Label-Free Super-Resolution Microscopy

Book excerpt: This book presents the advances in super-resolution microscopy in physics and biomedical optics for nanoscale imaging. In the last decade, super-resolved fluorescence imaging has opened new horizons in improving the resolution of optical microscopes far beyond the classical diffraction limit, leading to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014. This book represents the first comprehensive review of a different type of super-resolved microscopy, which does not rely on using fluorescent markers. Such label-free super-resolution microscopy enables potentially even broader applications in life sciences and nanoscale imaging, but is much more challenging and it is based on different physical concepts and approaches. A unique feature of this book is that it combines insights into mechanisms of label-free super-resolution with a vast range of applications from fast imaging of living cells to inorganic nanostructures. This book can be used by researchers in biological and medical physics. Due to its logically organizational structure, it can be also used as a teaching tool in graduate and upper-division undergraduate-level courses devoted to super-resolved microscopy, nanoscale imaging, microscopy instrumentation, and biomedical imaging.