Atomic Localization Fluorescent Microscopy

Super-resolution microscopy has revolutionized the imaging of complex physical and biological systems by surpassing the Abbe diffraction limit. Recent advancements, particular in single-molecular localization microscopy (SMLM), have pushed localization below nanometer precision [1–5], by applying prior knowledge of correlated fluorescence emission from single emitters [6]. However, averaging down from 1 nm to 1 Ångström requires a hundred-fold increase in collected photon signal [6–8]; this quadratic resource scaling represents a limitation bottleneck in SMLM due to photo-bleaching, extremely long integration times, and other practical constraints [9]. Here, we introduce a super-resolution method that breaks with the this scaling by applying another prior: the structure of the underlying atomic lattice. Specifically, applying this discrete grid imaging technique (DIGIT) in experiments on color centers in a diamond sample, we observe that the localization uncertainty reduces exponentially soon after localization falls below the host crystal’s atomic lattice constant. We demonstrate DIGIT under wide-field illumination for large-scale localization and spectroscopy of quantum emitters. By quantitatively linking the atomistic model of optical transitions in a sample with wide-field imaging readout, DIGIT presents a new tool for applications ranging from the identification of solid-state quantum memories in crystals to, potentially, the direct observation of optical transitions in the electronic structure of molecules.