Stefan Hell's microscope sees things that light waves should be too clumsy to reveal – and it won him this year's chemistry Nobel
TALK about microscopes and you bump up against the diffraction limit. Traditional microscopes cannot see objects smaller than about half the wavelength of light, because of how light bends and scatters at the edges of lenses. The limit equates to about 200 nanometres for visible light. "This has been impeding light microscopy throughout the 20th century," says Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany.
Hell won this year's Nobel prize in chemistry for his part in overcoming this problem. He pioneered an ingenious technique called stimulated emission depletion microscopy, whose basis is shining a beam of light at stained biological tissue so that the illuminated part fluoresces. Because ...
To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.
