High spatial resolution imaging and chemical specific detection in living organisms is important in a wide range of fields, from medicine to catalysis. In this work, we characterize a wide-field surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) imaging approach capable of simultaneously capturing images and SERS spectra from nanoparticle SERS-tags in cancer cells. By passing the image through a transmission diffraction grating before it reaches an array detector, we record the image and wavelength dispersed signal simultaneously on the camera sensor. Optimization of the experiment provides an approach with better spectral resolution and more rapid acquisition than liquid crystal tunable filters commonly used for wide-field SERS imaging. Intensity fluctuations inherent to SERS enabled localization algorithms to be applied to both the spatial and spectral domain, providing super-resolution SERS images that are correlated with improved peak positions identified in the spectrum of the SERS tag. The detected Raman signal is shown to be sensitive to the focal plane, providing 3D sectioning abilities for the detected nanoparticles. Our work demonstrates spectrally resolved super-resolution SERS imaging that has potential to be applied to complex physical and biological imaging applications.
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Reduction of Spectral Overlap in Spectral Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy Imaging Using a Dove Prism
The ability to combine microscopy and spectroscopy is beneficial for directly monitoring physical and biological processes. Spectral imaging approaches, where a transmission diffraction grating is placed near an imaging sensor to collect both the spatial image and spectrum for each object in the field of view, provide a relatively simple method to simultaneously collect images and spectroscopic responses on the same sensor. Initially demonstrated with fluorescence spectroscopy, the use of spectral imaging in Raman spectroscopy and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) can provide a vibrational spectrum containing molecularly specific information that can inform on chemical changes. However, a major complication to this approach is the spectral overlap that occurs when objects are spaced closely together horizontally. In this work, we add a dove prism to a spectral imaging instrument developed for SERS imaging, enabling rotation of the collected SERS image and dispersed spectrum onto the imaging complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensor. We demonstrate that this effectively reduces spectral overlap for emitters with clear separation between them and emitters with slightly overlapping point spread functions thereby facilitating collection of unambiguous spectra from each emitter.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2107791
- PAR ID:
- 10635861
- Publisher / Repository:
- Sage Publishing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Applied Spectroscopy
- Volume:
- 79
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 0003-7028
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1379 to 1385
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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