Broadband high-efficiency dielectric metalenses based on quasi-continuous nanostrips

Benefiting from the abrupt phase changes within subwavelength thicknesses,metasurfaces have been widely applied for lightweight and compact optical systems.Simultaneous broadband and high-efficiency characteristics are highly attractive for the practical implementation of metasurfaces.However,current metasurface devices mostly adopt discrete micro/nano structures,which rarely realize both merits simultaneously.In this paper,dielectric metasurfaces composed of quasi-continuous nanostrips are proposed to overcome this limitation.Via quasi-continuous nanostrips metasurface,a normal focusing metalens and a superoscillatory lens overcoming the diffraction limit are designed and experimentally demonstrated.The quasi-continuous metadevices can operate in a broadband wavelength ranging from 450 nm to 1000nm and keep a high power efficiency.The average efficiency of the fabricated metalens reaches 54.24%,showing a significant improvement compared to the previously reported metalenses with the same thickness.The proposed methodology can be easily extended to design other metadevices with the advantages of broadband and high-efficiency in practical optical systems.

Super-resolution morphological dissemination of intercalating dye in single DNA molecules via binding activated localization microscopy

Fluorescent dye （YOYO-I） intercalated with single DNA molecules were investigated via bindingactivated localization microscopy （BALM） at sub-diffraction limit resolutions. Various dye-to-DNA base pair （bp） ratios were imaged using the blinking property of YOYO-1 dye under optimum BALM switching buffer conditions. Individual DNA molecules exhibited regular/irregular intercalating phenomena with respect to dye-to-DNA bp ratio. The acquired images were reconstructed into super-resolution images by applying a Gaussian fit to the centroid of the point spread function. The YOYO-1 intercalated with λ-DNA possessed a non-homogeneous region due to the different binding modes of YOYO-1 with λ-DNA. Each binding mode was imaged at the sub-diffraction limit super-resolution. The distance between homogenously localized intercalating dyes within the DNA molecules was measured to be 34nm （n= 10; dye：DNAbp= 1：100） without photocleavage in 50mmol/L β-mercaptoethylamine buffer. The results were similar to those of the theoretical values without photocleavage in the base pairs of single DNA molecules below the diffraction limit. The results paved the way for an in-depth microscopic analysis of molecular variation with single λ-DNA molecules. With this method, it should be possible to analyze the exact base pair breakdown during various stages of cell apoptosis.