Journal
JOURNAL OF MATERIALS CHEMISTRY C
Volume 3, Issue 41, Pages 10907-10915Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/c5tc02310f
Keywords
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Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [51133001, 21374018]
- National 863 Foundation [2013AA031801]
- Science and Technology Foundation of Ministry of Education of China [2011-0071130002]
- Science and Technology Foundation of Shanghai [13JC1407800]
- Welsh Government
- Higher Education Funding Council for Wales through the Ser Cymru National Research Network in Advanced Engineering and Materials
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Microspheres can function as optical superlenses for nanoscale super-resolution imaging. The imaging performance is mainly affected by the size and refractive index of the microsphere. Precise control of these parameters is a challenging task but of fundamental importance to the further development of the technique. In this study, we demonstrate for the first time a nanoparticle-hybrid suspension polymerization approach to chemically synthesize high-quality microspheres (ZrO2/polystyrene) with optical properties that are highly controllable. Microspheres of different sizes (d: 2-20 mu m) and refractive indexes (n(p): 1.590-1.685) were synthesized and their super-resolution imaging performances were evaluated and compared. Our results show that continuously increasing the refractive index of microspheres can enhance the imaging resolution and quality. A 60 nm resolution has been obtained in the wide-field imaging mode and a 50 nm resolution has been obtained in the confocal mode imaging of semiconductor chip samples. The obtained 50-60 nm resolutions have significantly gone beyond the conventional 200 nm resolution limit for visible light optical microscopes; the super-resolution mechanism has been discussed. The synthesized microsphere superlenses may find applications in many other areas as well, including nanolithography, nanosensing, nano-diagnosis, nano-spectroscopy and ultra-high density optical data storage.
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