Polarization modulation with optical lock-in detection reveals universal fluorescence anisotropy of subcellular structures in live cells

The orientation of fluorophores can reveal crucial information about the structure and dynamics of their associated subcellular organelles. Despite significant progress in super-resolution, fluorescence polarization microscopy remains limited to unique samples with relatively strong polarization modulation and not applicable to the weak polarization signals in samples due to the excessive background noise. Here we apply optical lock-in detection to amplify the weak polarization modulation with super-resolution. This novel technique, termed optical lock-in detection super-resolution dipole orientation mapping (OLID-SDOM), could achieve a maximum of 100 frames per second and rapid extraction of 2D orientation, and distinguish distance up to 50 nm, making it suitable for monitoring structural dynamics concerning orientation changes in vivo. OLID-SDOM was employed to explore the universal anisotropy of a large variety of GFP-tagged subcellular organelles, including mitochondria, lysosome, Golgi, endosome, etc. We found that OUF (Orientation Uniformity Factor) of OLID-SDOM can be specific for different subcellular organelles, indicating that the anisotropy was related to the function of the organelles, and OUF can potentially be an indicator to distinguish normal and abnormal cells (even cancer cells). Furthermore, dual-color super-resolution OLID-SDOM imaging of lysosomes and actins demonstrates its potential in studying dynamic molecular interactions. The subtle anisotropy changes of expanding and shrinking dendritic spines in live neurons were observed with real-time OLID-SDOM. Revealing previously unobservable fluorescence anisotropy in various samples and indicating their underlying dynamic molecular structural changes, OLID-SDOM expands the toolkit for live cell research.

Linear-to-Circular Polarization Converter with Adjustable Bandwidth Realized by the Graphene Transmissive Metasurface

A tunable linear-to-circular polarization converter (LTCPC) for the terahertz (THz) regime which consists of two conductive layers and a graphene transmissive metasurface layer separated by two dielectric layers is reported in this work. The equivalent surface resistance modeling method is adopted to investigate the peculiar electronic properties of graphene. The simulation results show that when the Fermi energy (Ef) is 1.1 eV, the linearly-polarized wave can be transformed into the circularly-polarized wave in the working band ranging from 0.9498 THz to 1.3827 THz (the relative bandwidth is 37.1%) with axial ratio (AR) less than 3 dB. Moreover, the bandwidth can be regulated to the desired one by varying the Fermi level of graphene metasurface via a bias voltage rather than manually modifying the structure. We have analyzed the mechanism of the polarization conversion, especially, the magnitudes and the phase difference of cross- and co-polarization transmission coefficients, AR curves, and surface current diagrams at y-polarized incidence. Our findings open up promising possibilities towards the realization of graphene controllable devices for polarization modulation, which has advantages of adjustability over traditional devices.