Since the late seventeenth century, when Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used a microscope to explore the world of microbes,
Humans have made an effort to delve further into the world of the minuscule.
physical restrictions on how closely we can use conventional optical techniques to study an object.
The fact that light appears as a wave determines what is known as the diffraction limit.
All attempts to surpass this limit with "super lenses" have been met with severe visual losses, which renders the lenses opaque.
University of Sydney physicists have demonstrated a novel method for achieving superlensing with low losses.
exceeding the diffraction limit by a ratio of about four. Their success stemmed from their decision to completely remove the super lens.
The research has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
According to the researchers, the findings should enable scientists to further super-resolution microscopy.
It might improve imaging in a variety of disciplines, including forensics, medical imaging, and cancer diagnosis.
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The University of Sydney Nano Institute's Dr. Alessandro Tuniz, who teaches physics, announced, "We have now developed a practical way to implement superlensing, without a super lens."
We accomplished this by putting our light probe far from the item and gathering data in both high- and low-resolution.
A benefit of earlier techniques is that the probe doesn't tamper with the high-resolution data by measuring farther away.
Super lenses have been attempted to be made with new materials in the past.
According to Dr. Tuniz, "We overcome this by running the super lens operation on a computer as a post-processing step, after the measurement itself.
This uses the selective amplification of evanescent, or vanishing, light waves to create a "truthful" representation of the object.
"Our method could be applied to determine moisture content in leaves with greater resolution," stated Sydney Nano.