Scientists from the UK have just created the world's most powerful light microscope. While traditional optical microscopes allow objects up to one micrometer (0.000001 meters) to be seen clearly, the new instrument developed by engineers at the University of Manchester reduces the limit to 50 nanometers (0.00000005 meters) , according to the journal Nature Communications . That is, below the theoretical limit of optical microscopy.
Thanks to the new instrument, scientists will be able to directly examine the interior of human cells , as well as live viruses and biomolecules "in action" for the first time. The microscopes that were used until today to work at the nanometer scale (electron microscopes) can only see the surface of cells, but not examine their structure. And there was also no tool to visually study a live virus.
The system captures so-called "evanescent waves" , which occur on the surface of objects and, as the name suggests, quickly fade with distance and are lost. As they are not subject to the diffraction limit, if they are captured they can provide a much higher resolution than other traditional methods offer. The new microscope captures and amplifies them using microspheres , that is, small spherical glass particles.
