Glassy behavior (including hysteresis, irreversibility, a peak in the zero-field-cooled magnetization, and nonexponential relaxation) is observed in a quenched ferrofluid system consisting of 50-A magnetite particles. An

We discuss unique features of lens-free computational imaging tools and report some of their emerging results for wide-field on-chip microscopy, such as the achievement of a numerical aperture (NA) of ~0.8–0.9 across a field of view (FOV) of more than 20 mm2 or an NA of ~0.1 across a FOV of ~18 cm2, which corresponds to an image with more than 1.5 gigapixels. We also discuss the current challenges that these computational on-chip microscopes face, shedding light on their future directions and applications.

Optical imaging of nanoscale objects, whether it is based on scattering or fluorescence, is a challenging task due to reduced detection signal-to-noise ratio and contrast at subwavelength dimensions. Here, we report a field-portable fluorescence microscopy platform installed on a smart phone for imaging of individual nanoparticles as well as viruses using a lightweight and compact opto-mechanical attachment to the existing camera module of the cell phone. This hand-held fluorescent imaging device utilizes (i) a compact 450 nm laser diode that creates oblique excitation on the sample plane with an incidence angle of ~75°, (ii) a long-pass thin-film interference filter to reject the scattered excitation light, (iii) an external lens creating 2× optical magnification, and (iv) a translation stage for focus adjustment. We tested the imaging performance of this smart-phone-enabled microscopy platform by detecting isolated 100 nm fluorescent particles as well as individual human cytomegaloviruses that are fluorescently labeled. The size of each detected nano-object on the cell phone platform was validated using scanning electron microscopy images of the same samples. This field-portable fluorescence microscopy attachment to the cell phone, weighing only ~186 g, could be used for specific and sensitive imaging of subwavelength objects including various bacteria and viruses and, therefore, could provide a valuable platform for the practice of nanotechnology in field settings and for conducting viral load measurements and other biomedical tests even in remote and resource-limited environments.

Optical examination of microscale features in pathology slides is one of the gold standards to diagnose disease. However, the use of conventional light microscopes is partially limited owing to their relatively high cost, bulkiness of lens-based optics, small field of view (FOV), and requirements for lateral scanning and three-dimensional (3D) focus adjustment. We illustrate the performance of a computational lens-free, holographic on-chip microscope that uses the transport-of-intensity equation, multi-height iterative phase retrieval, and rotational field transformations to perform wide-FOV imaging of pathology samples with comparable image quality to a traditional transmission lens-based microscope. The holographically reconstructed image can be digitally focused at any depth within the object FOV (after image capture) without the need for mechanical focus adjustment and is also digitally corrected for artifacts arising from uncontrolled tilting and height variations between the sample and sensor planes. Using this lens-free on-chip microscope, we successfully imaged invasive carcinoma cells within human breast sections, Papanicolaou smears revealing a high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion, and sickle cell anemia blood smears over a FOV of 20.5 mm(2). The resulting wide-field lens-free images had sufficient image resolution and contrast for clinical evaluation, as demonstrated by a pathologist's blinded diagnosis of breast cancer tissue samples, achieving an overall accuracy of ~99%. By providing high-resolution images of large-area pathology samples with 3D digital focus adjustment, lens-free on-chip microscopy can be useful in resource-limited and point-of-care settings.

The direct observation of nanoscale objects is a challenging task for optical microscopy because the scattering from an individual nanoparticle is typically weak at optical wavelengths. Electron microscopy therefore remains one of the gold standard visualization methods for nanoparticles, despite its high cost, limited throughput and restricted field-of-view. Here, we describe a high-throughput, on-chip detection scheme that uses biocompatible wetting films to self-assemble aspheric liquid nanolenses around individual nanoparticles to enhance the contrast between the scattered and background light. We model the effect of the nanolens as a spatial phase mask centred on the particle and show that the holographic diffraction pattern of this effective phase mask allows detection of sub-100 nm particles across a large field-of-view of >20 mm2. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, we report on-chip detection of individual polystyrene nanoparticles, adenoviruses and influenza A (H1N1) viral particles.

Two relaxation peaks were found in the complex susceptibility of ferrofluids. Both can be described by the Vogel-Fulcher law t t 0 f͑T͒ exp͓E͞k͑T 2 T 0 ͔͒. Nevertheless, the physical origins for these two relaxations are quite different. We found that Néel relaxation strongly depends on the dipoledipole interaction. The dramatic dependence can be described by a surprisingly simple scaling relation: t t 0 exp͓E͞k͑T 2 af 0.8 ͔͒, where f is the volume fraction of the dipoles. In contrast, Brownian relaxation is much less sensitive to the concentration of magnetic moments because the interparticle force is mainly hydrodynamic in nature. [S0031-9007(96)00634-5] PACS numbers: 75.50. Mm, 61.20.Lc, 75.40.Gb, 82.70.Dd 0031-9007͞96͞77(2)͞390(4)$10.00

DNA imaging techniques using optical microscopy have found numerous applications in biology, chemistry and physics and are based on relatively expensive, bulky and complicated set-ups that limit their use to advanced laboratory settings. Here we demonstrate imaging and length quantification of single molecule DNA strands using a compact, lightweight and cost-effective fluorescence microscope installed on a mobile phone. In addition to an optomechanical attachment that creates a high contrast dark-field imaging setup using an external lens, thin-film interference filters, a miniature dovetail stage and a laser-diode for oblique-angle excitation, we also created a computational framework and a mobile phone application connected to a server back-end for measurement of the lengths of individual DNA molecules that are labeled and stretched using disposable chips. Using this mobile phone platform, we imaged single DNA molecules of various lengths to demonstrate a sizing accuracy of <1 kilobase-pairs (kbp) for 10 kbp and longer DNA samples imaged over a field-of-view of ∼2 mm2.

Wide field-of-view (FOV) and high-resolution imaging requires microscopy modalities to have large space-bandwidth products. Lensfree on-chip microscopy decouples resolution from FOV and can achieve a space-bandwidth product greater than one billion under unit magnification using state-of-the-art opto-electronic sensor chips and pixel super-resolution techniques. However, using vertical illumination, the effective numerical aperture (NA) that can be achieved with an on-chip microscope is limited by a poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at high spatial frequencies and imaging artifacts that arise as a result of the relatively narrow acceptance angles of the sensor's pixels. Here, we report, for the first time, a synthetic aperture-based on-chip microscope in which the illumination angle is scanned across the surface of a dome to increase the effective NA of the reconstructed lensfree image to 1.4, achieving e.g., ,250-nm resolution at 700-nm wavelength under unit magnification. This synthetic aperture approach not only represents the largest NA achieved to date using an on-chip microscope but also enables color imaging of connected tissue samples, such as pathology slides, by achieving robust phase recovery without the need for multi-height scanning or any prior information about the sample. To validate the effectiveness of this synthetic aperture-based, partially coherent, holographic on-chip microscope, we have successfully imaged color-stained cancer tissue slides as well as unstained Papanicolaou smears across a very large FOV of 20.5 mm 2 . This compact on-chip microscope based on a synthetic aperture approach could be useful for various applications in medicine, physical sciences and engineering that demand high-resolution wide-field imaging. Keywords: computational imaging; lensfree microscopy; on-chip microscopy; synthetic aperture INTRODUCTIONWide field-of-view (FOV) and high-resolution imaging is crucial for various applications in biomedical and physical sciences. Such tasks demand microscopes to have large space-bandwidth products (SBPs) with minimal spatial aberrations that distort the utilization of the SBP of the imaging system. Conventional lens-based digital microscopes can achieve high-resolution imaging over a large FOV using mechanical scanning stages to capture multiple images from different parts of the specimen that are digitally stitched together. This scanning approach, however, demands a relatively bulky and expensive imaging set-up. In contrast, recent advances in digital components and computational techniques have enabled powerful imaging methods,