Ultra-fast Particle Tracking Microscope

The ultra-fast particle tracking microscope allows bright field imaging to be performed at high speeds (using a Photron Mini UX50 monochrome CMOS camera) of up to 100,000 fps. Samples can be maintained at room temperature in a hydrated environment (Solent incubator), so the apparatus finds many applications in biological physics (e.g. live bacterial cells) and soft-condensed matter physics (e.g. the microrheology of polymers). A bright LED array (pE-100 LED CoolLED, UK) can be used to illuminate a sample at 525 nm with a bandwidth of 19 nm. The apparatus can also be used for dynamic multiple particle tracking microrheology experiments and a number of microfluidic platforms are available. It also finds applications in intracellular particle tracking e.g. gold labelled endosomes. A range of objective lenses are available e.g. an Olympus UAPON 100´ 1.49NA OTIRF lens. The apparatus is built on an Olympus IX70 inverted microscope frame placed on an active noise cancellation table (AVI350M dynamic vibration isolation system, Table Stable Ltd, Switzerland).