Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new technology that allows ordinary microscopes to the upper resolution as possible. The new technology improves the resolution of standard light microscopes so that they can be used to observe finer structures and details inside living cells directly. The new material transforms a classic luminous microscope into something called “super-resolution microscope”.
The university’s electric engineers have created a material designed capable of shortening the wavelength of the light when the sample is illuminated. The shortened wavelength of the light allows the microscope to imagine the material in a higher resolution. Electrical and IT engineering professor at UC San Diego, Zhaowei Liu, indicates that the material converts low resolution light to high resolution light. The teacher says that the material is very simple and easy to use, requiring a sample to place on the material, then all the time is placed under the microscope.
No complex modification is necessary for the sample or microscope itself. Work overcomes what has been a significant limitation of conventional light microscopes, their low resolution. Light microscopes are often used to imagine living cells but can not be used to see anything smaller than a living cell. The resolution limit on conventional light microscopes is 200 nanometers, which means that something closer than this distance can not be observed as a separate object.
As a general rule, observation of nothing more than 200 nanometers requires more powerful microscopes, such as an electron microscope that can see some cellular structures. However, electron microscopes can not observe living cells because a vacuum chamber is required for samples. Using the new material, a classic luminous microscope can photograph living subcellular structures with a maximum resolution of 40 nanometers.
The material created at the university is a microscopic slide covered with a type of light shrink material called hyperbolic material. It is built of nanometric thin layers of silver alternation and silica glass that shorten light wavelengths when light passes. The imaging technique creates a series of low-resolution images captured and collected by a reconstruction algorithm resulting in a high resolution image.
