Preface
The clear winner was light microscopy, which has remained
the most popular microscopy technique in the life sciences.
Stefan W. Hell, Nobel Lecture “Nanoscopy with Focused
Light” 2014
Based on these results, it is generally agreed that the
Rayleigh limit to resolution represents a practical limit to
resolution that can be achieved with a conventional imaging
system.
Joseph W. Goodman, Introduction to Fourier Optics 2005
The diffraction limit was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century by several
prominent scientists, including Abbe, Helmholtz, and Raleigh, and it stated that the
far-field resolution of optical systems is limited at k/(2n) level, where k is the
operating wavelength in a medium with the refractive index n. At the beginning of
twentieth century, it may seem almost impossible that the diffraction limit would be
overcome. The onset of a super-resolution era was manifested by a proposal in 1928
by E. H. Synge who was encouraged by Albert Einstein. He proposed “a miniature
aperture, whose diameter is approximately 10
−6 cm, has been constructed in an
opaque plate or film and that this is illuminated intensely from below, and is placed
immediately beneath the exposed side of the biological section, so that the distance
of the minute hole from the section is a fraction of 10
−6 cm” [E. H. Synge, Phil
Mag. 6, 356–362 (1928)] and suggested that the use of such miniature aperture can
in principle result in resolutions better than 10 nm. This principle underlies the
invention in 1984 of the near-field scanning optical microscope (NSOM) by Dieter
Pohl, Aaron Lewis, and coworkers. The race to improve the spatial resolution of
optical microscopes was one of the frontiers of science and technology in the
twentieth century. This story of success became possible due to a synergistic
interplay of new physical principles used in these instruments and new discoveries
in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology made by these devices with ever increasing
spatiotemporal resolution.
The range of applications of light microscopy is extraordinary wide, from the
observation of nanometer-sized gold particles by Adolf Zsigmondy in the beginning
of twentieth century (1925 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) to the discovery of green
v
The clear winner was light microscopy, which has remained
the most popular microscopy technique in the life sciences.
Stefan W. Hell, Nobel Lecture “Nanoscopy with Focused
Light” 2014
Based on these results, it is generally agreed that the
Rayleigh limit to resolution represents a practical limit to
resolution that can be achieved with a conventional imaging
system.
Joseph W. Goodman, Introduction to Fourier Optics 2005
The diffraction limit was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century by several
prominent scientists, including Abbe, Helmholtz, and Raleigh, and it stated that the
far-field resolution of optical systems is limited at k/(2n) level, where k is the
operating wavelength in a medium with the refractive index n. At the beginning of
twentieth century, it may seem almost impossible that the diffraction limit would be
overcome. The onset of a super-resolution era was manifested by a proposal in 1928
by E. H. Synge who was encouraged by Albert Einstein. He proposed “a miniature
aperture, whose diameter is approximately 10
−6 cm, has been constructed in an
opaque plate or film and that this is illuminated intensely from below, and is placed
immediately beneath the exposed side of the biological section, so that the distance
of the minute hole from the section is a fraction of 10
−6 cm” [E. H. Synge, Phil
Mag. 6, 356–362 (1928)] and suggested that the use of such miniature aperture can
in principle result in resolutions better than 10 nm. This principle underlies the
invention in 1984 of the near-field scanning optical microscope (NSOM) by Dieter
Pohl, Aaron Lewis, and coworkers. The race to improve the spatial resolution of
optical microscopes was one of the frontiers of science and technology in the
twentieth century. This story of success became possible due to a synergistic
interplay of new physical principles used in these instruments and new discoveries
in Physics, Chemistry, and Biology made by these devices with ever increasing
spatiotemporal resolution.
The range of applications of light microscopy is extraordinary wide, from the
observation of nanometer-sized gold particles by Adolf Zsigmondy in the beginning
of twentieth century (1925 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) to the discovery of green
v