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Silicon nitride waveguide platform for fluorescence microscopy of living cells

2017; Optica Publishing Group; Volume: 25; Issue: 22 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1364/oe.25.027678

1094-4087

Jean‐Claude Tinguely, Øystein Ivar Helle, Balpreet Singh Ahluwalia,

Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques

Waveguide chip-based microscopy reduces the complexity of total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy, and adds features like large field of view illumination, decoupling of illumination and collection path and easy multimodal imaging. However, for the technique to become widespread there is a need of low-loss and affordable waveguides made of high-refractive index material. Here, we develop and report a low-loss silicon nitride (Si3N4) waveguide platform for multi-color TIRF microscopy. Single mode conditions at visible wavelengths (488-660 nm) were achieved using shallow rib geometry. To generate uniform excitation over appropriate dimensions waveguide bends were used to filter-out higher modes followed by adiabatic tapering. Si3N4 material is finally shown to be biocompatible for growing and imaging living cells.