Resonant dielectric multilayer with controlled absorption for enhanced total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy

Abstract

Total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIRF-M) is widely used in biological imaging. Evanescent waves, generated at the glass-sample interface, theoretically strongly improve the axial resolution down to a hundred of nanometers. However, objective based TIRF-M suffers from different limitations such as interference fringes and uneven illumination, mixing both propagating and evanescent waves, which degrade the image quality. In principle, uneven illumination could be avoided by increasing the excitation angle, but this results in a drastic loss of excitation power. We designed dedicated 1D photonic crystals in order to circumvent this power loss by directly acting on the intensity of the evanescent field at controlled incident angles. In this framework, we used dedicated resonant multi-dielectric stacks, supporting Bloch surface waves and resulting in large field enhancement when illuminated under the conditions of total internal reflection. Here, we present a numerical optimization of such resonant stacks by adapting the resulting resonance to the angular illumination conditions in TIRF-M and to the fluorescence collection constraints. We thus propose a dedicated resonant structure with a control of the absorption during thin film deposition. A first experimental demonstration illustrates the concept with a 3-fold fluorescence enhancement in agreement with the numerical predictions.