Microscopy & Imaging News and Discussions

[caltrek]

Physics-Defying Quasiparticles Could Open a Whole New World of Microscopy
by Felicity Nelson
October 20, 2023

Introduction:

(Science Alert) To pry into the private lives of objects in the microscopic domain (and beyond), scientists often rely on extremely bright sources of light.

The free electron lasers that get the best results accelerate electrons over several kilometers towards light speed, wiggling them through a large hall of magnets to shake free intense pulses of photons that light up materials for study.

Now, an international team of physicists think they can achieve the same effect with a much smaller device using quasiparticles – particle-like entities that emerge out of the complex interactions of a collective of other particles.

If their concept can be developed into a workable technology, it may give even more researchers around the world unparalleled visibility into the tiniest structures they are studying, yielding insights into viruses, computer chips, photosynthesis, and the chemistry of the stars.

Particle accelerators that can fit inside a building are much less powerful than those like the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) in California. The size of a small town, its lengthy electron racetrack is capable of emitting highly energetic waves of light in the X-ray part of the spectrum.

Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/physics-d ... roscopy

[wjfox]

Unbreakable Barrier Broken: New “Superlens” Technique Will Finally Allow Scientists to See the Infinitesimal

October 18, 2023

Researchers have developed a potentially revolutionary superlens technique that once seemed impossible to see things four times smaller than even the most modern microscopes have seen before. Known as the ‘diffraction limit’ because the diffraction of light waves at the tiniest levels has prevented microscopes from seeing things smaller than those waves, this barrier once seemed unbreakable.

Many have tried to peer below this optical barrier using a technique that researchers in the field term ‘superlensing,” including making customized lenses out of novel materials. But all have gathered too much light. Now, a team of physicists from the University of Sydney says they have discovered a viable path that peeks beyond the diffraction limit by a factor of four times, allowing researchers to see things smaller than ever seen before. And the way they did, it is like nothing anyone else has tried.

https://thedebrief.org/unbreakable-barr ... nitesimal/

[firestar464]

Is this for optical or atomic telescopes?

[weatheriscool]

Engineers pair laser light to crystal lattice vibrations to enhance optical properties of 2D material
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-pair-lase ... tions.html
by Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science

Engineers at Columbia University and theoretical collaborators at the Max Planck for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter have found that pairing laser light to crystal lattice vibrations can enhance the nonlinear optical properties of a layered 2D material. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Cecilia Chen, a Columbia Engineering Ph.D. student and co-author of the recent paper, and her colleagues from Alexander Gaeta's Quantum and Nonlinear Photonics group, used hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). hBN is a 2D material similar to graphene: its atoms are arranged in a honey-combed-shaped repeating pattern and can be peeled into thin layers with unique quantum properties. Chen noted that hBN is stable at room temperature, and its constituent elements—boron and nitrogen—are very light. That means they vibrate very quickly.

[wjfox]

Is this for optical or atomic microscopes?

Optical.

[weatheriscool]

Camera captures the world as animals see it, with up to 99% accuracy
By Bronwyn Thompson
January 25, 2024

It’s easy to forget that most animals don’t see the world the way humans do. In fact, with infrared and ultraviolet sight, many animals experience a world that is completely invisible to us.

Now, however, scientists have developed hardware and software that allows you to capture footage as if it was filmed through the eyes of animals such as honeybees and birds.

It’s an intriguing, revealing look at nature and animal behavior, and one the researchers from the University of Sussex and the Hanley Color Lab at George Mason University believe will have a wide range of uses. As such, they’ve made the software open-source, encouraging everyone from nature documentary makers and ecologists to outdoors enthusiasts and bird-watchers to take a peek inside these animals’ very different visual realities.

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-sea-metha ... lands.html

[firestar464]

AI technique 'decodes' microscope images, overcoming fundamental limit

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-ai-techni ... mages.html

[weatheriscool]

World’s fastest camera shoots at 156.3 trillion frames per second
By Michael Irving
March 26, 2024
https://newatlas.com/technology/scarf-w ... er-second/

Engineers at INRS Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre in Canada have developed the world’s fastest camera, which can shoot at an astonishing 156.3 trillion frames per second (fps).

The best slow-mo cameras in phones are usually working with a few hundred fps. Professional cinematic cameras might use a few thousand, to achieve a smoother effect. But if you want to see what’s going on at the nanoscale, you’ll need to slow things way down, to the billions or even trillions of frames per second.

The new camera can reportedly capture events that occur in the realm of femtoseconds – quadrillionths of a second. For reference, there’s about as many of those in one second as there are seconds in 32 million years.

[weatheriscool]

[weatheriscool]

Airborne single-photon lidar system achieves high-resolution 3D imaging
https://phys.org/news/2024-04-airborne- ... ution.html
by Optica

Researchers have developed a compact and lightweight single-photon airborne lidar system that can acquire high-resolution 3D images with a low-power laser. This advance could make single-photon lidar practical for air and space applications such as environmental monitoring, 3D terrain mapping and object identification.

Single-photon lidar uses single-photon detection techniques to measure the time it takes laser pulses to travel to objects and back. It is particularly useful for airborne applications because it enables highly accurate 3D mapping of terrain and objects even in challenging environments such as dense vegetation or urban areas.