Super-resolution imaging with metamaterials

The key area of investigation of this research project was the application of metamaterials to super-resolution optical imaging. Specifically, an optical microscope was proposed to emulate a TIRF-SIM microscope, but using metamaterials to create a structured evanescent field. A metamaterial unit cell design of two ‘H’ shape nano-holes at ±45° to the normal in a gold film, with 50nm feature size was developed and simulated in CST Microwave Studio, able to produce structured evanescent illumination patterns. Although this original design proved unsuccessful, both in terms of fabrication and image reconstruction, an alternative design was developed. Alongside this, in MATLAB an algorithm for SIM image reconstruction using the typical sinusoidal masks was created successfully. Then to accommodate atypical SIM masks, such as those produced by the metamaterials, new approaches to SIM image reconstruction were also developed. These approaches modelled the masks as the sum of sinusoids and as the product of sinusoids. These reconstruction approaches were unsuccessful when using the original metamaterial masks, but were successfully able to reconstruct image with improved resolution, compared to standard SIM, using the alternative metamaterial masks. Moreover, resolution enhancement was demonstrated using six masks instead of the nine or more typically used