INFRARED MICROSPECTROSCOPE WITH 100 NM RESOLUTION

描述（改编自申请人摘要）：申请人提出 台式红外显微光谱仪的结构 从生物样品的100 nm X 100 nm区域获得红外光谱 水介质中的样品。 这代表了一个因素的改善 超过了商用红外显微镜的4,000倍 用传统的光源完成。 它也代表了一个 比衍射极限低大约30 °。 在这项决议中， 应该可以在不需要 使用任何染色剂或荧光标记，依赖于内在的 组成生物分子的振动吸收光谱。 新 红外显微镜取决于新的可调谐红外 激光源，允许以前需要的新仪器 基于加速器的激光 与普林斯顿大学的研究人员合作， 研究人员在美国加州大学、斯坦福大学和波士顿大学的 最近开发了世界上第一个扫描近场红外 利用基于自由电子激光（FEL）的显微镜对生物样品进行成像。 这种新的显微镜已经证明，它是有可能打破 衍射极限在光谱的红外部分，并已被用来 获取半导体和生物组织的红外图像 路段 最有希望的是能够首次获得， 水下的红外图像 研究人员建议， 新的显微镜版本可以构建， 振动光谱从一个单一的位置在一个样本的长度尺度， 是史无前例的 这项提议需要一系列新的发展 在许多领域，依靠激光、扫描探针、 显微镜，新材料，以及所有这些对生物学的适应， 样品 同时，新技术的回报也是 非常有前途，因为它依赖于固有的光谱 生物分子的特性，而不是外部应用的染色剂或 令人不安的标签。

DESCRIPTION (Adapted from the applicant's abstract): The applicant proposes the construction of a table top infrared microspectrometer that is capable of obtaining infrared spectra from a lOO nm X lOO nm region of a biological specimen in an aqueous medium. This represents an improvement of a factor of 4,000 over what commercial infrared microscopes are capable of accomplishing with conventional light sources. It also represents an improvement of roughly 30 below the diffraction limit. At this resolution, it should be possible to characterize sub-cellular organelles without having to use any stains or fluorescent labels, relying on the intrinsic vibrational absorption spectrum of the constituent biomolecules. The new infrared microscope depends on the availability of new tunable infrared laser sources, allowing for new instruments that previously required accelerator-based lasers. In collaboration with investigators at Princeton University, Stanford University and Boston University, the investigators have recently developed the world's first scanning near field infrared microscope based on free electron laser (FEL) to image biological samples. This new microscope has demonstrated that it is possible to break the diffraction limit in the infrared part of the spectrum, and has been used to acquire infrared images of both semiconductor and biological tissue sections. Most promising is the ability to obtain, for the first time, infrared images under water. The investigators propose that a table-top version of the new microscope can be constructed that can result in vibrational spectra from a single location in a sample on length scales that are unprecedented. The proposal requires a confluence of novel developments in many fields, relying on breakthroughs in lasers, scanning probe microscopes, new materials, and the adaptation of all of this to biological samples. At the same time, the payoff of the new technique is also extremely promising, because of its reliance on the intrinsic spectral characteristics of biomolecules, and not on externally applied stains or perturbing labels.