Blinking of fluorescent nanoparticles is a compelling phenomenon with widely debated mechanisms. The ability to inhibit or control blinking is important for applications in the field of optical, semiconductor and fluorescent imaging. Self-blinking nanomaterials are also attractive labels for localization-based super-resolution microscopy. In this work, we have synthesized silver core silica nanoparticles (Ag@SiO2) doped with Rhodamine 110 and studied the parameters that affect blinking. We found that under nitrogen rich conditions the nanoparticles shifted towards higher duty cycles. Also, it was found that hydrated nanoparticles showed a less drastic response to nitrogen rich conditions as compared to dried nanoparticles, indicating that surrounding matrix played a role in the response of nanoparticles to molecular oxygen. Further, the blinking is not a multi-body phenomena, super-resolution localization combined with intensity histogram analysis confirmed that single particles are emitting.

The last decade has seen significant advances in 3D localization precision driven by demanding applications in biological super-resolution microscopy. These applications have been constrained by precision in the z direction, which had previously been limited to above 10 nm for general applications. Here we present sub-10 nm localization precision using Bessel beam microscopy (BBM) at application-relevant photon counts. BBM uses an axicon, a conical optical element, to transform the point spread function of a microscope to a Bessel pattern, the spatial frequency of which is a simple function of emitter depth. We describe the BBM optical system, outline a method for image analysis, and demonstrate localization of fluorescent silver core silica nanoparticles with better than 10 nm precision in all directions.