Radially polarized tip-enhanced near-field coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy for bioimaging

Abstract

CARS is meritorious in its ability to perform chemical selective imaging, but its spatial resolution is limited by the diffraction limit of light; however, this limit can be broken by combining CARS and near-field scanning microscope. In this work, we report a novel radially polarized near-field coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy (RP-NF-CARS), which uses radially polarized light as excitation to enhance the electric field enhancement under a metallic tip, and improves the signal to background ratio compared with that using linearly polarized excitations. We applied RP-NF-CARS to image nano-scale polystyrene beads and biological system. © 2012 Copyright Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).