Nano-Viewing Record Broken 65
smitty777 writes "Wired magazine reports on a new nanoviewing lens that is capable of viewing objects less than 100 nm across. Rather than attempting to use a 'perfect' lens, this technology uses a porous surface that actually scatters the light. By measuring how it is scattered and setting up lasers to compensate, they're able to 'steer' the light back to the right spot. The abstract from the Physical Review Letters reads: 'The smallest structures that conventional lenses are able to optically resolve are of the order of 200 nm. We introduce a new type of lens that exploits multiple scattering of light to generate a scanning nanosized optical focus. With an experimental realization of this lens in gallium phosphide we imaged gold nanoparticles at 97 nm optical resolution. Our work is the first lens that provides a resolution better than 100 nm at visible wavelengths.'"
Re:Anyone with more knowledge care to explain? (Score:5, Informative)
You can download the article from Arxiv for free here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3643
Basically, the imaging resolution of a lens (typically) has to do with its numerical aperture (NA). A small lens far away has terrible resolution, and vice-versa. The trouble with really high NA lenses is that they are hard to make without distortions. It's easy to make spherical shapes, but aptly named spherical distortion starts to ruin your image once the NA gets high. So what they've done is taken a ground glass surface and put it really close to the object, so that the "scattering lens" subtends close to 2pi steradians. Then they use a spatial light modulator (transmissive LCD screen) to control the phase of their laser beam across many domains to sort of pick out the random scattering elements on the frosted screen that give them the best image. Sort of. There is much additional trickery, but I think that's the jist of it.
Re:Light spectrum beneath 400nm? (Score:4, Informative)
It's not as simple as that. In the double-slit experiment, which gives an interference pattern even if you fire one photon at a time, the photon is influenced by both slits (several hundred nm apart or more). If you cover one slit, the interference disappears.