Feb 10 2009
A collaborative effort between researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Stanford University has demonstrated a breakthrough in optical nanoscopy, the science of imaging and sensing of nanoscale objects.
The research, led by professors Rafael Piestun of electrical and computer engineering at CU-Boulder and William E. Moerner of chemistry at Stanford, also involved doctoral students Sri Rama Prasanna Pavani of CU and Michael Thompson at Stanford.
The interdisciplinary work has demonstrated for the first time a method for three-dimensional optical imaging of objects smaller than 20 nanometers over a wide spatial range, hence defeating the so-called fundamental optical diffraction limit by one order of magnitude.
The findings are being published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences under the title "Three-Dimensional Single-Molecule Fluorescence Imaging Beyond the Diffraction Limit Using a Double-Helix Point Spread Function."
Optical imaging at these scales is of great interest in biomedical sciences and nanotechnology. The new findings, which provide a powerful tool for the "super resolution" of single molecules, have implications for characterizing defects in materials, the characterization of nanostructures, and the three-dimensional, biophysical and biomedical imaging of tagged molecules inside and outside of cells.