Integrated photonics-based structured illumination for single molecule analysis

Fluorescence microscopy is an indispensable tool in biology and medicine and has fuelled many breakthroughs in a wide set of sub-domains. The microscopes, however, are often bulky and expensive systems that require regular maintenance. Additionally, they need to strike a compromise between device size, the size of the field of view, and resolution.

The next big push in microscopy with a large societal impact will come from compact, cost-effective, and robust optical read-out systems that will make fluorescence imaging much more scalable and accessible.  

Our team is working on facilitating this next breakthrough by introducing a novel high-resolution imaging platform based entirely on an intimate marriage of active on-chip photonics, flat optics, and CMOS image sensors. This concept will eliminate the necessity of standard free-space optical components by integrating specially designed structured optical illumination, illumination modulation, an excitation filter and an image sensor in a single chip. The way the sample is illuminated is analogues to total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy, which has excellent surface sensitivity and background suppression. The resulting platform will enable high-resolution, large field of view, fast, and robust microscopy with applications reaching from cellomics to DNA sequencing, proteomics, and highly parallelized optical biosensors.

For more background information have a look at : https://www.imec-int.com/en/articles/chip-scale-microscope-high-throughput-fluorescence-imaging

The main goals of this PhD are to:

• develop scanning and reconstruction methods that extend the usable field of view and enable temporal information to be extracted from molecular assays.
• provide extensive characterization of, and proof of concept measurements with, existing devices which you can post-process in the imec cleanroom, and new devices per your design.

Depending on the candidate, this PhD can have a stronger focus on nanofabrication and experiment, or theory and image reconstruction. The candidate should have a strong background in nanofabrication, data analysis, and computational imaging, with an interest in combining experimental research and computational methods for advanced sensing and imaging applications. More specifically, a good candidate has a combination of the following:

• Good notions of wave propagation and interference, (integrated) photonics, optics, (fluorescence) microscopy, image processing, fourier optics
• Experience with nanofabrication (electron beam lithography, surface functionalization, ...)
• Experience with optical or photonics measurement setups
• Experience with coding (Python, Matlab, ...)
• Experience with numerical simulation tools such as FDTD (e.g. Lumerical) or FEM (e.g. Comsol) is an asset