Two-point separation in far-field super-resolution fluorescence microscopy based on two-color fluorescence dip spectroscopy, Part I: Experimental evaluation

The two-point resolution of a novel two-color far-field super-resolution fluorescence microscopy was evaluated by measuring fluorescent beads 100 nm in diameter. This microscopy is based on a combination of two-color fluorescence dip spectroscopy and a phase-modulation technique for a laser beam. By simply introducing two-color laser light, the size of the fluorescent image of a bead was shrunk down to a diameter of 250 nm from the diffraction-limited image with a diameter of 360 nm. For two closely adjacent fluorescent beads with a separation distance of 350 nm, the two-color microscope clearly gave separated fluorescence images, while the conventional one-color fluorescence microscope could not resolve them. It has been proved that our technique breaks Rayleigh's diffraction limit.