Label-free surface plasmon resonance holographic microscopy: principles and applications

Abstract Surface-sensitive optical microscopies are able to study light-matter interactions occurring in the near-field area on a metallic surface and have been widely applied in the fields of biomedicine, material science, nanophotonics, surface chemistry, etc. As one of such microscopies, surface plasmon resonance holographic microscopy (SPRHM) has been proved to be a powerful tool for exploring samples of interest in the near field. Basically, SPRHM combines digital holography, which can measure complex amplitudes of object waves, with the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensing technique, which possesses high sensitivity with tiny changes of physical parameters in the near field. SPRHM provides SPR intensity and phase images simultaneously to visualize extremely weak interacting phenomena in a wide-field and label-free manner with high detection sensitivity. Up to now, SPRHM has demonstrated its capabilities in investigating cell-substrate interactions, mapping thickness distribution of thin films, measuring complex refractive index of 2D materials, etc. In this review, we outline the development trace of SPRHM, elucidate its principle and implementation methods, introduce the experimental setups which feature the common-path hologram recording structures, and summarize its applications. Furthermore, important issues regarding the dynamic range and spatial resolution of SPRHM are discussed in detail and the research perspective is given.