Single Particle Imaging of Rare Earth Doped Nanoparticles by Multiphoton Microscopy
Fabienne Pelle, Ludovic Caillat, Bassam Haji, Vasyl Shynkar and Joseph Zyss
Efficiency and photostability of multiphoton excited luminescence have attracted interest very recently for biophotonics, in particular for cell and small animal imaging. In this work, we demonstrate a down scaling of the resolution in multiphoton microscopy taking advantage of the high nonlinearity of up-converted emissions recorded in Tm, Yb co-doped fluoride nanoparticles. Measured lateral and axial resolutions are as good as obtained with Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy but with an excitation in the Near Infra-red. Since up-conversion does not requires coherent excitation to be observed, this opens the way to develop a low cost imaging with a rather good resolution.
Keywords: Upconversion, Multiphoton microscopy, Rare earth ions, Nanoparticles.