Two become one: various diffraction patterns showing Rayleigh's criterion. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Spencer Blevin) Scientists have long believed that diffraction limits the minimum distance that ...

(Nanowerk News) Until recently, it was widely believed among physicists that it was impossible to compress light below the so-called diffraction limit (see fact box), except when using metal ...

Schematic of the planar device for producing dark- field speckle patterns. (Image from USTC). Credit: Douguo Zhang et al. Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) have ...

With the development of photonic chips and nano-optics, the old ground glass lenses can't keep up in the race toward miniaturization. In the search for a suitable replacement, a team from the ...

Attempts to break the diffraction limit with 'super lenses' have all hit the hurdle of extreme visual losses. Now physicists have shown a new pathway to achieve superlensing with minimal losses, ...

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Vol. 120, No. 866 (11 April 2008), pp. 430-438 (9 pages) ABSTRACT.Filled arrays of bolometers are currently being employed for use in astronomy ...

I seem to be writing about microscopy fairly often these days. First there was the article about a new technique that was able to resolve features smaller than that allowed by the diffraction limit.

The Abbe diffraction barrier, which fundamentally restricted the lateral optical resolution to 200 – 300 nm until the early 1990s, can be overcome by super-resolution optical fluorescence imaging ...

Sum-frequency generation (SFG) is a powerful vibrational spectroscopy that can selectively probe molecular structures at ...

Researchers built a silver-grooved chip that channels laser energy into nanometer-spaced peaks, beating the diffraction limit and aiding light-matter studies. (Nanowerk News) Physics is full of pesky ...

Two groups of researchers have shown that the minimum size of a laser need not be restricted by the wavelength of light it emits, provoking a rethink of what optics and lasers can do at the nanoscale.