Breaking the blur barrier: Working around super-resolution imaging's glitches
Thursday, May 7, 2020 - 08:20
in Physics & Chemistry
Medical researchers face a hurdle when studying cells under an optical microscope—the laws of physics. Obtaining an image of anything below a certain size is complicated; optical apertures and the wavelength of visible light play havoc with clarity. Known as the diffraction limit, it was first encountered by German physicist Ernst Abbe in 1873, and limits the resolution to 200 nanometers (nm) at best (or 200 billionths of a meter).