New Microscope for the Nanoworld

 


New research was just published in Nature Photonics. It was written by researchers from the universities of Gottingen, Oxford and the university Medical Center Gottingen. The team has been successful in building a microscope with resolutions better than 5 billions of a meter (5 nanometers). This is approximately a human hair split into 10,000 strands. 

The new microscope can capture even the tiniest cell structures. It’s hard to imagine something so small. A good comparison is if you were to compare one nanometer to one meter - it’s about the equivalent of comparing the diameter of a hazelnut to earth’s diameter.

It works by ‘single - molecule localization microscopy’.

This is where a single fluorescent molecule in a substance is switched on and off. This switch allows their position to be viewed precisely. The entire structure of the material can then be modeled from the location of these molecules. The process can show resolutions of 10 to 20 nanometers. 

Professor Jorg Enderlein works in the University of Gottingen’s faculty of Physics. He has been able to double the resolution of previous microscopes. This is due to a highly sensitive detector and special data analysis. 

He reports, “this newly developed technology is a milestone in the field of high resolution microscopy. It not only offers resolutions in a single digit nanometer range, but is also particularly Cost-effective and easy to use compared to other methods.” 

The researchers also released a software update for data processing when publishing these findings. This means that the microscopy will be available to a wide range of scientists in the future. 


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