INFRARED MICROSPECTROSCOPE WITH 100 NM RESOLUTION

描述(改编自申请人的摘要)：申请人提出 台式红外显微光谱仪的研制 从生物的100纳米×100纳米区域获得红外光谱 在水介质中的样品。这代表着一个因素的改善 超过商用红外显微镜所能达到的4000 用常规光源来完成。它还代表了一个 在衍射极限以下提高了大约30%。在这项决议下， 应该可以表征亚细胞细胞器而不需要 使用任何着色剂或荧光标签，依赖于固有的 组成生物分子的振动吸收光谱。新的 红外显微镜取决于新型可调谐红外显微镜的可用性 激光光源，允许以前需要的新仪器 基于加速器的激光器。与普林斯顿大学的研究人员合作 大学、斯坦福大学和波士顿大学，调查人员 最近开发出了世界上第一个扫描近场红外 基于自由电子激光(FEL)的生物样品成像显微镜。 这种新的显微镜已经证明，有可能打破 衍射极限在光谱的红外部分，并已被用于 获取半导体和生物组织的红外图像 横断面。最有希望的是第一次获得 水下的红外图像。调查人员提出，一张桌面 新显微镜的版本可以建造成可以导致 样品中单一位置在长度尺度上的振动光谱 是前所未有的。这项提议需要结合各种新颖的发展。 在许多领域，依靠激光、扫描探头的突破 显微镜，新材料，以及所有这些对生物的适应 样本。与此同时，新技术的回报也是 非常有希望，因为它依赖于内在的光谱 生物分子的特性，而不是外用的污渍或 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.