Super-Resolution Imaging at Mid-Infrared Waveband in Graphene-nanocavity formed on meta-surface

Plasmonic structured illumination microscopy (PSIM) is one of the promising wide filed optical imaging methods, which takes advantage of the surface plasmons to break the optical diffraction limit and thus to achieve a super-resolution optical image. To further improve the imaging resolution of PSIM, we propose in this work a so called graphene nanocavity on meta-surface structure (GNMS) to excite graphene surface plasmons with a deep sub-wavelength at mid-infrared waveband. It is found that surface plasmonic interference pattern with a period of around 52 nm can be achieved in graphene nanocavity formed on structured meta-surface for a 7 μm wavelength incident light. Moreover, the periodic plasmonic interference pattern can be tuned by simply changing the nanostructures fabricated on meta-surface for different application purposes. At last, the proposed GNMS structure is applied for super-resolution imaging in PSIM and it is found that an imaging resolution of 26 nm can be achieved, which is nearly 100 folds higher than that can be achieved by conventional epi-fluorescence microscopy. In comparison with visible waveband, mid-infrared is more gently and safe to biological cells and thus this work opens the new possibility for optical super-resolution imaging at mid-infrared waveband for biological research field.