Abstract
Airy beams maintain their intensity profiles over a large propagation distance without substantial diffraction and exhibit lateral bending during propagation(1-5). This unique property has been exploited for micromanipulation of particles(6), generation of plasma channels(7) and guidance of plasmonic waves(8), but has not been explored for high-resolution optical microscopy. Here, we introduce a self-bending point spread function (SB-PSF) based on Airy beams for three-dimensional (3D) super-resolution fluorescence imaging. We designed a side-lobe-free SB-PSF and implemented a two-channel detection scheme to enable unambiguous 3D localization of fluorescent molecules. The lack of diffraction and the propagation-dependent lateral bending make the SB-PSF well suited for precise 3D localization of molecules over a large imaging depth. Using this method, we obtained super-resolution imaging with isotropic 3D localization precision of 10-15 nm over a 3 μm imaging depth from ∼2000 photons per localization.