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

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.

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.