9:00 AM - 9:30 AM
▲ [18a-E208-1] [INVITED] Investigation of Multiscale Biomolecular Dynamics with Plasmonic Nanoapertures
Keywords:Plasmonic nanoaperture arrays, Multiscale biomolecular dynamics
Optical molecular imaging and sensing techniques based on light localization are explored. The creation of locally amplified electromagnetic near-fields on surface plasmon-enhanced metallic nanoarray structures has been investigated in many studies because of the potential for extreme light confinement to improve molecular detection sensitivity and resolving power for imaging processes that would be typically impossible to observe under the diffraction limit. By colocalization of light-matter distribution using plasmonic nanoaperture arrays, it was shown that improvement of detection sensitivity by several orders of magnitude would be plausible. For imaging, although many emerging microscopy approaches have been highly successful to produce super-resolved images beyond imagination, we explore alternative techniques based on plasmonic nanoarrays by which achievable resolution may be customized to fit specific imaging needs. Feasibility studies on multiscale dynamics of molecular complexes such as internalization of virus particles, sliding microtubules, intracellular mitochondrial movement, and bacterial motility on random and periodic plasmonic nanoaperture patterns performed. Enhancement of axial resolution for the detection of intracellular protein distribution is reported by extraordinary light transmission using linearly graded plasmonic nanoapertures. To be also described in this presentation is the switching-based light localization to circumvent the diffraction limit of far-field optics under the Rayleigh criterion, thereby implement full-field super-resolution microscopy. Localization switching can also be used to improve image resolution of label-free surface plasmon microscopy which suffers from plasmon scattering in a conventional set-up. Improvement of surface coverage of localized fields is discussed using random nanocomposite islands for light switching.