High-Resolution Optical Imaging

sp00 writes "Researchers at the University of Rochester have created the highest resolution optical image ever, revealing structures as small as carbon nanotubes just a few billionths of an inch across. The new method should open the door to previously inaccessible chemical and structural information in samples as small as the proteins embedded in a cell's membrane. The research appears in today's issue of Physical Review Letters."

Comments

What, no pictures?

[barakn]

It seems more like spectroscopy to me anyway.

Re:What, no pictures?

[Simon Field]

If you go to this page you will get a new picture every time you hit the refresh button.

The process is a scanning one, like an AFM, but the probe exites the atoms underneath it to make light. The light they make has spectral lines, so you get more than just a picture. With a picture, you get the amplitude and the color of a spot. Here you also get that, but there is more information in the "color", so you can tell what type of molecule you are next to.

After hours in the lab.

[heldlikesound]

Kevin: Dude, just do it.
Eric: No, I am NOT going to do it.
Kevin: Remember when Marcy photocopied her chest, she got caught and she didn't even get in trouble!
Eric: This is different...
Kevin: How are they even going to know it's your p...
Eric: DUDE, I'm not doing it!

Rife Microscope?

[hackwrench]

So, is this anything like the Rife Microscope?

Pictures?

[bluesoul88]

For the love of god, put a picture on that page! My buttcheeks are clenching with suspense!

...

bluesoul88 would like to apologize for that last comment. =)

Read the article, have some questions..

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

First of all, they call it an optical microscope. But I couldn't find any optics. Besides, an electron microscope does have optics. So if they want to call it something, shouldn't it be a light microscope?

Secondly, the whole context of the article was that this would let you 'see' as in with light, what something would look like. Reading the article, we find out that the photons are emitted from the sample in some way that might not at all correspond with what the thing might 'look' like.

I guess this opens up the whole question of what something *might* look like when you are imaging it at a resolution far beyond the traditional resolution of light.

Re:Read the article, have some questions..

[QuantumFTL]

Firstly, glad to see you actually read the article. IANAP yet, but I'm close to my degree, so let me attempt to answer your questions.

First of all, they call it an optical microscope. But I couldn't find any optics. Besides, an electron microscope does have optics. So if they want to call it something, shouldn't it be a light microscope?

Blockquoth the dictionary definition (abridged):

optical - adjective:
of, relating to, or utilizing light especially instead of other forms of energy (ex. optical microscopy)

That was just one of the many definitions of "optical". Optical is one of those scientific words that can mean so many things. I took a class on Optics here at Cornell, and we almost never mentioned mirrors or lenses, it was about the fundamental nature of waves as described by the linear wave equation. A "light" microscope wouldn't really be a good technical term, as it doesn'ty even say what range the "light" is, whereas "optical" implies visible light (see the rest of the definition).

On to your second question:
Secondly, the whole context of the article was that this would let you 'see' as in with light, what something would look like. Reading the article, we find out that the photons are emitted from the sample in some way that might not at all correspond with what the thing might 'look' like.

I'm not sure where you are getting the idea that the article (or anyone else) claims that this allows us to see exactly what these structures "look" like. It very specifically states that it they are looking for specific types of information found in light, as opposed to electron scattering, etc. Quote: With this technique we have a detailed spectrum for every point on a surface. This is very early on in the article, and the entire article uses the word "see" in quotes, hinting that we're not really seeing anything at that scale.

I'm not really sure what things would look like at that scale, but I doubt that has any revelevance to anything but aestetic curiousity. There's an awful lot of scattering which goes on at those length scales, as the objects are near the size of the light waves themselves. The human eye is a far-field optical instrument, and therefore would never see anything but a blur even with our best possible far-field optical microscopes. That's the entire point of this technology, stuff doesn't "look" like anything meaningful on that scale to our perception, however we can extract spectral and spatial data on the features from their Ramen scattering, etc.

On the other hand, our sense of vision is supposed to give us spectral and spatial information on objects we are observing, so in that sense things "look" exactly like what this microscope "sees". It's an interesting question, and it's really quite a matter of definition.

Re:Read the article, have some questions..

[Goldsmith]

You have to watch out for those definitions. By your definition of optical, and x-ray diffraction machine is a far higher resolution optical microscope than this.

I agree with you that there appears to be no real practicle use for this, it's cool, but it's hard to get excited over it when an AFM is getting delivered to my lab monday.

Re:Read the article, have some questions..

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

I agree. Years ago I worked in the semiconductor maskmaking industry. We had both conventional and electron beam microscopes. The conventional ones were always called light microscopes when there was any ambiguity.

Re:Read the article, have some questions..

[MichaelDelving]

Ramen microscopy, Ramen scattering, mmm... Is it lunchtime yet? Now when someone catches me subverting the coffee machine's hot water tap, I can claim I'm just doing my part for science. Lunch or Science? You decide.

Re:What, no Hooty?

[Anonymous Coward]

This whole thing SMACKS of the new Hooty vs. Ninnle Battle of the Linux distributions!

well..

[C21]

I think the problem with the above comments are that they are equating imaging with seeing. They are truly not the same, I see this as a useful tool to feed into a computer for the computer to "see" the image. Can you say quantum physics?

If you say 'nanoinch' then the metricists have won

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the imperial system used power-of-2 fractions of an inch (1/4 of an inch, 1/8, ...). So that should read "a few 1/1,073,741,824 of an inch", I believe.

Oh great...

[fritter]

It's only a matter of time until they start selling this via pop-under ads.

how do they focus the light back into an image?

[ndevice]

How do they get the image from the thing that they're looking at back to that gold needle of theirs? Sure, it might be a point source, but even with a point source that small you're going to have problems focusing - the same problems they were talking about, about the thing they're imaging being smaller than the wavelength of the light that they're using.

They _do talk about trying to get the first _optical_ images of smaller molecules, unless I'm reading it wrong.

Re:how do they focus the light back into an image?

[Simon Field]

The image doesn't go back to the needle.

Think of the needle as a point source of something that can excite molecules to emit light.

Now as you move the needle around, you know where you put it. Now you can use a relatively huge light sensor to look at the light that was emitted by the molecule under the probe. The sensor gives you the amount of light, and the spectrum of the light. Knowing where you put the probe gives you the X and Y location of the molecule. Putting it all together gives you a 2 dimensional map of which molecules are where.

Re:If you say 'nanoinch' then the metricists have

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the imperial system used power-of-2 fractions of an inch (1/4 of an inch, 1/8, ...). So that should read "a few 1/1,073,741,824 of an inch", I believe.

So would that be "nabi-inch" then?

Researchers Zoom In on the Nanoscale

[rpiquepa]

The work of Achim Hartschuh, Erik J. Sánchez, X. Sunney Xie, and Lukas Novotny has been published by Physical Review Letters, Volume 90, Number 9, March 7, 2003. Here is a link to the abstract of their paper, "High-Resolution Near-Field Raman Microscopy of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes." You also can read the summary I wrote on this subject, "The Smallest Sight: Researchers Zoom In on the Nanoscale."

Here is their site.

[deglr6328]

I work at the lab where these guys did this. They gave a fascinating lecture on it a few weeks ago, here's their website complete with pictures.

Optics of an e- Microscope

[DrLudicrous]

Isn't it true that an electron microscope is not really seeing the sample? Rather, it is observing the density of states, which is then 'translated' into an image on a monitor. Anyone else have any idea about what I am talking about? Someone told me this a while back and it seemed to make sense. Also, anyone have any idea what the magnification reached was? If they are measuring sub-nm features, that would be about an order of magnitude or two improvement on the best electron microscopes out there. BUT it doesn't seem that it will provide the same kind of image, just as an AFM doesn't do what an SEM does, which is different from a TEM. It will be another tool to do imaging for specific samples looking for specific features of the properties of said sample. But I guess that goes without saying.

Re:Optics of an e- Microscope

[QuantumFTL]

Well, in a few of my classes we have discussed electron microscopes, and while I'm certainly no expert, how they work isn't exactly voodoo.

Isn't it true that an electron microscope is not really seeing the sample? Rather, it is observing the density of states, which is then 'translated' into an image on a monitor. "See" is a very interesting word, and I assume you mean recieving information in the visible light regime. According to that definition, no, it does not "see". It's actually a bit more like a sense of touch, as electrons are knocked off of the surface and we can take that scattering information and infer a surface topology (amoung other things) from that information. Atomic Force Microscopes are even more like a sense of touch in this way. This kind of science isn't really interested in generating "wow-golly" pictures of things, it's aimed at creating models which allow us to visualize and study the structure of small things.

BUT it doesn't seem that it will provide the same kind of image, just as an AFM doesn't do what an SEM does, which is different from a TEM.

This is what I said in my original post... It's just a tool for gathering scientific information. Spectral data is very rich and very useful, so it's not "just another" microscope, this is a big deal. Time will tell what we learn from this.

Cheers,
Justin