Toward fluorescence nanoscopy

By Stefan W. Hell. Nature Biotechnology, 2003

999 citations recorded by the source corpus.

For more than a century, the resolution of focusing light microscopy has been limited by diffraction to 180 nm in the focal plane and to 500 nm along the optic axis. Recently, microscopes have been reported that provide three- to sevenfold improved axial resolution in live cells. Moreover, a family of concepts has emerged that overcomes the diffraction barrier altogether. Its first exponent, stimulated emission depletion microscopy, has so far displayed a resolution down to 28 nm. Relying on saturated optical transitions, these concepts are limited only by the attainable saturation level. As strong saturation should be feasible at low light intensities, nanoscale imaging with focused light may be closer than ever.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Biophysics, Structural Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a284fb95517fce9c11236067156bc80a2b2cb06e

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Citations in the corpus

Photoactivatable fluorescent proteins (2005, background): “A new concept known as stimulated emission depletion (STED), which breaks the diffraction limit of light microscopy, has recently been propose”
Visualization of image data from cells to organisms (2010, neutral): “There are variants of this method increasing axial resolution (for example, 4Pi microscopy) 85 .”
STED microscopy reveals crystal colour centres with nanometric resolution. (2009, background): “The increase in resolution follows the anticipated inverse square-root la”
Far-Field Optical Nanoscopy (2007, background): “The fluorescent singlet state S1 and the ground state S0 used in STED microscopy is the most basic and obvious pair of bright and dark states [39], but other examples will be given later, when discussing various nanoscopy implementations.”