Isotropic 3D Nanoscopy based on single emitter switching

We propose and analyze a method for isotropic resolution in far-field fluorescence nanoscopy based on switching and mathematically localizing individual emitters. Under typical imaging conditions, the coherent detection of fluorescence light through two opposing high angle lenses strongly improves the 3D-resolution down to 5-10nm in all directions. Furthermore, we give a detailed analysis of the resolution of this and other single molecule switching based approaches using the Fisher information matrix. We verify the results by Monte-Carlo simulations of the imaging process and by applying a simple maximum-likelihood estimator for position determination. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America