Three-Dimensional Optical Nanoscopy

Super-resolution microscopy has revolutionized biological imaging in the last decade, revealing nanoscale structures and mechanisms using visible-light fluorescence, compatible with live cell imaging. Importantly - techniques for sub-wavelength imaging and single-particle-tracking have been extended to the third dimension (depth) as well; various methods have been developed to circumvent the fundamental trade-off between lateral resolution and axial depth-of-field, and to provide three-dimensional microscopic information.

This talk will review existing approaches for nanoscale optical imaging and tracking in 3D, and present key methods, considerations and applications. Specific attention will be given to point-spread-function engineering, a technique in which the depth of a point source is encoded in its shape on the camera, using special optical phase-masks.