Engineers at MIT have developed a small, mirrored chip that helps to produce dark-field images without dedicated expensive components. When placed on a microscope's stage, the chip emits a hollow cone of light that can be used to generate detailed dark-field images of algae, bacteria, and similarly translucent tiny objects. The middle layer of the optical chip functions as the chip's light source, made from a polymer infused with quantum dots—tiny nanoparticles that emit light when excited with fluorescent light. Over this light-generating layer, the researchers placed a structure made from alternating nanoscale layers of transparent materials, with different refractive indices.
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Funding Agency
(Funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health)