Mechanical stability of a microscope setup working at a few kelvins for single-molecule localization

摘要

A great advantage of single-molecule fluorescence imaging is the localization precision of molecule beyond the diffraction limit. Although longer signal-acquisition yields higher precision, acquisition time at room temperature is normally limited by photobleaching, thermal diffusion, and so on. At low temperature of a few kelvins, much longer acquisition is possible and will improve precision if the sample and the objective are held stably enough. The present work examined holding stability of the sample and objective at 1.5 K in superfluid helium in the helium bath. The stability was evaluated by localization precision of a point scattering source of a polymer bead. Scattered light was collected by the objective, and imaged by a home-built rigid imaging unit. The standard deviation of the centroid position determined for 800 images taken continuously in 17 min was 0.5 nm in the horizontal and 0.9 nm in the vertical directions.