Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

It’s subscription only, but if you happen to have access to a university library, the latest issue of Nature Methods has several awesome articles on the development of optical microscopy techniques that overcome the diffraction limit.  Translated into layman’s speech, they explain how people are developing microscopes to see things smaller than any microscope could see before (at least when working with visible light).  Before this work was done, the conventional understanding of the laws of physics said it must be impossible.  But some stubborn people made it possible, and now biologists are using these tools.

If you want to know what the theoretical limit is for the speed of one of these techniques, keep your eyes peeled for my article in an upcoming issue of Biophysical Journal.  (And expect another article to come out later this year, showing how resolution factors into these trade-offs, and some surprising results on resolution, speed, and image processing algorithms.)  If you want to see some theoretical models of ways to apply these techniques in lithography, come see one of my students give a talk at the APS March Meeting.

When I give talks on this, a question usually comes up about how far we can go with this, and the questioners usually ask about scenarios that I really don’t think are possible.  And I always tell them that I don’t think their scenarios are possible based on our current understanding and tools.  But then I add that 10 years ago everybody thought that the stuff I’m showing was impossible, so who knows?  Hell, a mere 5 years ago, before I started working in this field, I was teaching optics for photographers, and in the lecture on the resolution limit of a lens I would say that what I’m showing them in that lecture is one of the few timeless results that is unlikely to be supplanted by new technologies (as opposed to, say, the lecture on how a CCD detector works).  And now I’m working on beating the diffraction limit.  So who knows?