The Slow Accumulation Of Technology To Make Ultra-Fast Microscopic Movies

This is an image captured by CU-Boulder researchers using an ultrafast optical microscope shows clouds of electrons oscillating in gold material in space and time. The width of the image is 100 nanometers (about the size of a particle that will fit through a surgical mask), while the time between the top and bottom frame (10 fs, or femtoseconds) is less than 1 trillionth of a second. (Photo credit: University of Colorado)

The modern era is, as you probably know, a pretty amazing time to be alive and working in science. It’s not just the super-exotic stories likedetecting gravitational waves that move matter less than the width of a proton, either, but things that are fairly commonplace. It’s now a fairly routine matter to make pictures of materials with a resolution comparable to the size of an atom– the small college where I teach has a couple of different microscopes that can do it. If you have any sense of history of science, that’s absolutely astounding– only a little over a hundred years ago, there was still some debate as to whether atoms were real physical objects or just a calculational tool, and I recall reading (slightly outdated) science books as a kid that confidently asserted the impossibility of taking pictures of a single atom. And now, it’s an undergrad lab.

Of course, these kinds of technologies don’t just appear out of nowhere. They’re not giant leaps, but an accumulation of tiny steps, putting together lots of other technologies that have built up over time. Last week, I got a press release about a new paper from thelab of Markus Raschke at the University of Colorado that makes a good jumping-off point to talk about this sort of process. It comes with the jargon-heavy title “Plasmonic nanofocused four-wave mixing for femtosecond near-field imaging” but the main result is very cool: they have demonstrated a laser-based “ microscope” that makes images with nanometer-scale resolution in space, and a “frame rate” of a few femtoseconds for tracking the motion of electrons in time.

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