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Morales-Inostroza L, Folz J, Kühnemuth R, Felekyan S, Wieser FF, Seidel CAM, Götzinger S, Sandoghdar V. An optofluidic antenna for enhancing the sensitivity of single-emitter measurements. Nat Commun 2024; 15:2545. [PMID: 38514627 PMCID: PMC10957926 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46730-w] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/27/2023] [Accepted: 03/08/2024] [Indexed: 03/23/2024] Open
Abstract
Many single-molecule investigations are performed in fluidic environments, for example, to avoid unwanted consequences of contact with surfaces. Diffusion of molecules in this arrangement limits the observation time and the number of collected photons, thus, compromising studies of processes with fast or slow dynamics. Here, we introduce a planar optofluidic antenna (OFA), which enhances the fluorescence signal from molecules by about 5 times per passage, leads to about 7-fold more frequent returns to the observation volume, and significantly lengthens the diffusion time within one passage. We use single-molecule multi-parameter fluorescence detection (sm-MFD), fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) and Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) measurements to characterize our OFAs. The antenna advantages are showcased by examining both the slow (ms) and fast (50 μs) dynamics of DNA four-way (Holliday) junctions with real-time resolution. The FRET trajectories provide evidence for the absence of an intermediate conformational state and introduce an upper bound for its lifetime. The ease of implementation and compatibility with various microscopy modalities make OFAs broadly applicable to a diverse range of studies.
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Affiliation(s)
- Luis Morales-Inostroza
- Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, 91058, Erlangen, Germany
- Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin, 91058, Erlangen, Germany
- Department of Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058, Erlangen, Germany
| | - Julian Folz
- Chair for Molecular Physical Chemistry, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany
| | - Ralf Kühnemuth
- Chair for Molecular Physical Chemistry, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany
| | - Suren Felekyan
- Chair for Molecular Physical Chemistry, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany
| | - Franz-Ferdinand Wieser
- Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, 91058, Erlangen, Germany
- Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin, 91058, Erlangen, Germany
- Department of Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058, Erlangen, Germany
| | - Claus A M Seidel
- Chair for Molecular Physical Chemistry, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany.
| | - Stephan Götzinger
- Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, 91058, Erlangen, Germany
- Department of Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058, Erlangen, Germany
- Erlangen Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technologies (SAOT), Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, D-91052, Erlangen, Germany
| | - Vahid Sandoghdar
- Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, 91058, Erlangen, Germany.
- Department of Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058, Erlangen, Germany.
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Neumann M, Wei X, Morales-Inostroza L, Song S, Lee SG, Watanabe K, Taniguchi T, Götzinger S, Lee YH. Organic Molecules as Origin of Visible-Range Single Photon Emission from Hexagonal Boron Nitride and Mica. ACS Nano 2023. [PMID: 37276077 DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.3c02348] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/07/2023]
Abstract
The discovery of room-temperature single-photon emitters (SPEs) hosted by two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride (2D hBN) has sparked intense research interest. Although emitters in the vicinity of 2 eV have been studied extensively, their microscopic identity has remained elusive. The discussion of this class of SPEs has centered on point defects in the hBN crystal lattice, but none of the candidate defect structures have been able to capture the great heterogeneity in emitter properties that is observed experimentally. Employing a widely used sample preparation protocol but disentangling several confounding factors, we demonstrate conclusively that heterogeneous single-photon emission at ∼2 eV associated with hBN originates from organic molecules, presumably aromatic fluorophores. The appearance of those SPEs depends critically on the presence of organic processing residues during sample preparation, and emitters formed during heat treatment are not located within the hBN crystal as previously thought, but at the hBN/substrate interface. We further demonstrate that the same class of SPEs can be observed in a different 2D insulator, fluorophlogopite mica.
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Affiliation(s)
- Michael Neumann
- Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea
- Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea
| | - Xu Wei
- Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea
- Department of Energy Science, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea
| | | | - Seunghyun Song
- Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea
- Department of Electronics Engineering, Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul 04310, Republic of Korea
| | - Sung-Gyu Lee
- Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea
- Department of Energy Science, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea
| | - Kenji Watanabe
- Research Center for Functional Materials, National Institute for Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba 305-0044, Japan
| | - Takashi Taniguchi
- International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics, National Institute for Materials Science, 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba 305-0044, Japan
| | - Stephan Götzinger
- Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, D-91058 Erlangen, Germany
- Department of Physics, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), D-91058 Erlangen, Germany
- Graduate School in Advanced Optical Technologies (SAOT), Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), D-91052 Erlangen, Germany
| | - Young Hee Lee
- Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea
- Department of Energy Science, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea
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Cantillano C, Morales-Inostroza L, Real B, Rojas-Rojas S, Delgado A, Szameit A, Vicencio RA. Observation of dipolar transport in one-dimensional photonic lattices. Sci Bull (Beijing) 2017; 62:339-344. [PMID: 36659418 DOI: 10.1016/j.scib.2017.01.035] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/27/2016] [Revised: 01/19/2017] [Accepted: 01/20/2017] [Indexed: 01/21/2023]
Abstract
We experimentally study the transport properties of dipolar and fundamental modes on one dimensional (1D) coupled waveguide arrays. By carefully modulating a wide optical beam, we are able to effectively excite dipolar or fundamental modes to study discrete diffraction (single-site excitation) and gaussian beam propagation (multi-site excitation plus a phase gradient). We observe that dipolar modes experience a larger spreading area due to an effective larger coupling constant, which is found to be more than two times larger than the one for fundamental modes. Additionally, we study the effect of non-diagonal disorder and find that while fundamental modes are already trapped on a weakly disorder array, dipoles are still able to propagate across the system.
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Affiliation(s)
- Camilo Cantillano
- Departamento de Física, MSI-Nucleus on Advanced Optics, and Center for Optics and Photonics (CEFOP), Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile
| | - Luis Morales-Inostroza
- Departamento de Física, MSI-Nucleus on Advanced Optics, and Center for Optics and Photonics (CEFOP), Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile
| | - Bastián Real
- Departamento de Física, MSI-Nucleus on Advanced Optics, and Center for Optics and Photonics (CEFOP), Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile
| | - Santiago Rojas-Rojas
- Center for Optics and Photonics and MSI-Nucleus on Advanced Optics, Universidad de Concepción, Casilla 160-C, Concepción, Chile
| | - Aldo Delgado
- Center for Optics and Photonics and MSI-Nucleus on Advanced Optics, Universidad de Concepción, Casilla 160-C, Concepción, Chile
| | - Alexander Szameit
- Institute for Physics, University of Rostock, D-18059 Rostock, Germany
| | - Rodrigo A Vicencio
- Departamento de Física, MSI-Nucleus on Advanced Optics, and Center for Optics and Photonics (CEFOP), Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile.
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Weimann S, Morales-Inostroza L, Real B, Cantillano C, Szameit A, Vicencio RA. Transport in Sawtooth photonic lattices. Opt Lett 2016; 41:2414-2417. [PMID: 27244377 DOI: 10.1364/ol.41.002414] [Citation(s) in RCA: 17] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/05/2023]
Abstract
We investigate, theoretically and experimentally, a photonic realization of a Sawtooth lattice. This special lattice exhibits two spectral bands, with one of them experiencing a complete collapse to a highly degenerate flat band for a special set of inter-site coupling constants. We report the observation of different transport regimes, including strong transport inhibition due to the appearance of the non-diffractive flat band. Moreover, we excite localized Shockley surface states residing in the gap between the two linear bands.
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