Quantum microscope can examine cells in unprecedented detail
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
Here's a more info from Technion
Imagine if someone here said, 'I spoke to the scientists who made the microscope and they said...'. We'd think that was awesome? That's in the New Scientist article.
The article references “squeezed light” which is a trick for adding more certainty to a photons position (at the expense of less certainty in its momentum - heisenburg always wins)
To learn more about squeezed light check out this video from PBS Spacetime[0]. The video doesn’t cover this light microscope, but does explain squeezed light.
Are we reading different articles? From the article:
They used a type of microscope with two laser light sources, but sent one of the beams through a specially designed crystal that “squeezes” the light. It does so by introducing quantum correlations in the photons – the particles of light in the laser beam.
The photons were coupled into correlated pairs, and any of them that had energies unlike the others were discarded instead of being paired off. That process lowered the intensity of the beam while decreasing its noise, which allowed for more precise imaging.
Frustrating.
I'm guessing New Scientist had not got permission to use the stuff yet?
-The Court "
For those who don't have access to Nature it includes an example image.
>They used a type of microscope with two laser light sources, but sent one of the beams through a specially designed crystal that “squeezes” the light. It does so by introducing quantum correlations in the photons – the particles of light in the laser beam. The photons were coupled into correlated pairs, and any of them that had energies unlike the others were discarded instead of being paired off.
Which tells us nothing, and as someone who took both physics and quantum computing in university, infuriating. They used magic? Got it. Details, or you just made shit up. You're newscientist, do better.
I would have thought that bacteria would look much more homogeneous internally, at least at this scale.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03528-w.epdf?shar...
Light, on the other hand, has a wavelength in the order of nanometers. If my math is correct, the wavelength of light is smaller than that of sound by a factor of around 1000000000000 on average.
Then some instruments came along that took advantage of lysing cells for analysis: flow cytometry.
If you can look at cells without going full-power Death Star on them, that sounds damn useful.
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I anticipate Applied Science will build one in his garage over the weekend and apologize for not making it 2 orders-of-magnitude more sensitive than UQ's. :bow before the might of this over-achiever who ships, a hacker as salty as my HP 48G/X:
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/500-preparing-samp...
A low energy optical microscope can examine living samples (in aqueous environments).
It doesn't matter how small the structures you can observe are if you can't be sure they haven't been warped and distorted by dehydration, doping with heavy metals like osmium, exposure to vacuum, and being blasted with radiation until it's heated to 150 degrees celsius.
Don't get me wrong: electron microscopy is great for mineral samples, and can be used for biological samples subject to some constraints. But you can't examine specimens with it while they're alive.