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Nano-Viewing Record Broken
smitty777 writes "Wired magazine reports on a new nanoviewing lens that is capable of viewing objects less than 100 nm across. Rather than attempting to use a 'perfect' lens, this technology uses a porous surface that actually scatters the light. By measuring how it is scattered and setting up lasers to compensate, they're able to 'steer' the light back to the right spot. The abstract from the Physical Review Letters reads: 'The smallest structures that conventional lenses are able to optically resolve are of the order of 200 nm. We introduce a new type of lens that exploits multiple scattering of light to generate a scanning nanosized optical focus. With an experimental realization of this lens in gallium phosphide we imaged gold nanoparticles at 97 nm optical resolution. Our work is the first lens that provides a resolution better than 100 nm at visible wavelengths.'"
Don't be mad. Now at least you can find your penis with this lens.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
just an estimate. the textbook record is 1000 years, of darkness/absence of truth. yuk.
100nm? So that's what? 100 times the length of Taco's penis?
Oh, sure, you talk like it's so easy, but have you ever TRIED to fix a broken record? All you end up with is a piece of crap that constantly skips and repeats endlessly. It's even worse than trying to play a scratched one.
Hence the origin of the phrase "broken record".
(yes very offtopic, going for funny...)
pics or it didn't happen
... now we might be able to read all the fine print in those EULA's now...
Can someone in the know help interpret the article? Is this an engineering breakthrough or a scientific breakthrough? From my understanding the wavelength of light is a physical limitation to optically viewing small objects. Does this somehow provide us a way to go beyond that limit or is this simply getting closer to it?
Wait wait wait... How are you able to get "visible wavelengths" from something that would only be the size of something deep in the Ultraviolet range on the electromagnetic spectrum?
Serious question here, as I'd like to know if this means they're looking at quarterwave light or what...
Just curious, hope someone knows. How are they able to make transistors that are 32nm when they can only see 100nm? How do they verify?
does this mean that if we achieve a tighter concentration of pores on the lens we will achieve gradually smaller scales?
"I'm taking this loop off." - Jack O'Neill
What record was broken, a bluray disk? That was how I first read the title, confusing record with some disk.
There are my keys...
Just as soon as they can find the IQ of the conservatives. I heard it's etched on the side of the electron in a hydrogen atom.
theoretically it.s 0.0001^10 -50e but we don't want to assume and get it wrong it could be higher than that. but from judging by the SMARTEST conservatives, It's probably accurate.
Anyways, Who said the new nintendo console was going to be as small as a Conservatives penis? That would explain why all you low IQ types drive SUV's with truck nuts... Compensating hard there...
SNOM (Scanning Near-field scanning optical microscopes) can easily resolve images at 100 nm at visible wavelengths and have done so for some years now. You can actually buy these microscopes commercially. I'm sure this new method is better than SNOM in some regard, or has the potential to be, but the resolution they achieved is not really a "Nano Viewing Record". More a lens building record.
Non-optical methods like scanning force microscopy have resolved far better than that for years now, of course. Albeit without the ability do do spectroscopic measurements.
Interesting approach though.
Why don't you calm down, have a seat over there, eat another tofu burger and shut the fuck up to let all that natural estrogen in the soy do its work. Then you can tell me about "compensating".
So, the sample must sit on a very narrow area on the plate with the diffuser. Mah looks like we did not break free from the real limitations then. If we could do this in the middle of a cell, that may be something. The point they make is that you can use this diffuser as a - perfect- lens because one can compensate the phase distortion really well. The image they get is in resolution close to the theoretical wave limit. The surprise is that this works better than the classical approach of making optics: trying to fight off spherical aberration by making good multi-element lenses. So, nice job compensating. But that's it The sample still needs to sit on a small confined are on their plate. There are other techniques that will show the sample with visible light with way more resolution, in particular Scanning Near Field Optical Microscopy will go down to a few nm! So, in my opinion nice work, good prank, but way way over sold. This would have done nice in optics express but seems out of place in Phys Ref letters.
First off physics says this is rubbish. They just re-invented super-resolution enhancement of point sources.
First you need to know why a "perfect" lens is special. When light leaves a small region the shape of the wavefront can be described in a Fourier transform sense as a set of plane waves with various K vectors. Now it turns out that not all K-vectors can propagate to the far field. Ones with K-vectors greater than the reciprocal wavelength simply decay a short distance from the source and never reach the far field.
Thus if you are in the far field and were to time-reverse all the wavefronts you recieved then it would back-propagate to the source but the phase front when it reached the source position will be a blurred version of the source. This is because it's missing all those critical K-vectors. This cannot be replaced because you simply did not know what amplitudes and phases they had.
A perfect lens is special because it captures those decaying k-vectors and effectively (resonantly to conserve energy) amplifies them. You can thus detect this formerly missing information. Therefore you can resolve the sub-wavelength features at full resolution.
SO there's the issue. what they claim is fundamentally not possible. They are claiming they can reconstruct the missing k-vectors. they can't. without nearfield imaging or a perfect lens, physics says those are bye-bye.
But you can "fake" it. this is called super-resolution. If you know something about the source. for example, that it's a point source or collection of isolated point sources then you can impose that information on the data to find the mathematical reconstruction of the image consistent with that information. Thus you can compute the missing K-vectors.
That cannot be done if the thing you are imaging is arbitrary. You have to know something to make up the missing information. It may be that this information is small: e.g. maybe you know the surface is not multi-scattering in depth or you know something about the derivative of the surface curvature or you know something about how it reflects different colors.
But this is "super resolution" enhancement not actual imaging. And that has been done for a long time before this.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
How about the bankers and traders compensate the American Ppl for the crash they caused by shorting the toxic assets they talked up while selling them?