New optical microscope

2002/07/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Irudiak/Soinuak

A new microscope has been developed to visualize the functioning of the inside of the cell. In fact, the conventional optical microscope has not yet been able to separate anything that is less than half the wavelength of the light passing through its lenses.

This has occurred for over a hundred years and has been the result of basic optics. And then what? Well, the optical microscope is ‘blind’ to details like the cell nucleus. For the study of nanometer structures, researchers have used the x-ray microscope and electron microscope, but the use of any of them causes the killing of organisms.

However, at the Max Planck Institute in Germany they have developed a new technique that has allowed them to improve their resolution a thousand times. To check the operation of the new microscope, an image of the fiber of a bacterium 30 nanometers thick has been made. For more technical information, see the Physical Review Letters issue of April 22.