On November 7, 2019, Hui Yu ‘s research group from School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, published a new paper entitled "Quantitative Amplitude and Phase Imaging with Interferometric Plasmonic Microscopy" on ACS Nano

Plasmonic microscopy is a powerful tool for nanoscopic bio- and chemical sample analysis due to its high sensitivity. Phase quantification in plasmonic microscopy would provide inherent information, i.e., refractive index, for identification of nanomaterials. However, it usually relies on complex optics to acquire quantitative phase images. In this article, they demonstrated the quantitative amplitude and phase imaging capabilities through holographical reconstructions of the plasmonic patterns recorded in the interferometric plasmonic microscopy.

Their work based on the improved SPRM technology proposed by Yu Hui's group in PNAS 2018, named as Interference Plasma Microscopy Imaging (IPM) (PNAS, 2018 115 (41) 10275-10280). In this work, the intensity and phase information of the surface plasma field are obtained directly from IPM images by the method of holographic imaging reconstruction. The characteristic of this method is that the twinning image is suppressed by a larger incident Angle. This technique can observe the interaction between metal nanostructures and surface plasma waves. Compared with the near field detection technique, it is much simpler and faster, and contains light field information. Further combined with deconvolution and other algorithms, the refraction index and other information of sample materials can be quantitatively analyzed. Meanwhile, this technology also provides a potential new method for labeling free plasma super-resolution imaging. The research results are of great significance in the application of nano plasma, biological single particle single molecule detection, super resolution imaging and other fields.

This research was completed by Hui Yu ‘s research group, the School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiaotong University. Postdoctoral fellow Yuting Yang is the first author, and Professor Hui Yu is the corresponding author. Doctoral students Chunhui Zhai , Qiang Zeng , and postdoctoral fellow Ab Lateef Khan also made efforts to this research. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (#61805136 and #61901257) and the Shanghai Pujiang Program (#18PJ1406400).

Article Link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsnano.9b08259