[HN Gopher] Light-shrinking material lets ordinary microscope se... ___________________________________________________________________ Light-shrinking material lets ordinary microscope see in super resolution Author : thedday Score : 82 points Date : 2021-06-01 18:01 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (phys.org) (TXT) w3m dump (phys.org) | jl2718 wrote: | > The technology consists of a microscope slide that's coated | with a type of light-shrinking material called a hyperbolic | metamaterial. It is made up of nanometers-thin alternating layers | of silver and silica glass. | phkahler wrote: | Is something like this useful for chip fabrication somehow? | syntaxing wrote: | I was wondering the same exact thing. Wouldnt this be very | helpful for EUV masks? | Narew wrote: | probably not, speckle is random and they use several images to | reconstruct the final result. | buescher wrote: | You'd have to start from the speckles to illuminate it in | reverse somehow! | swiley wrote: | I thought they already used holography to make masks with | certain repeating patterns. | _Microft wrote: | The paper is open access and linked from the bottom of the | article btw. | | [PDF] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21835-8.pdf | m4x wrote: | > The wide-field of view image reconstruction takes 10 mins on a | desktop computer with a GTX 1080Ti graphics card and a i7-8700k | CPU to reconstruct an image with 100 by 100 raw pixels | | That's an impressive amount of computation per pixel | nojokes wrote: | It is but this is also fairly ancient system. More modern | systems should be able to shrink time needed for computation - | also research facilities may have access to a cluster. | robotresearcher wrote: | I looked it up. GTX1080Ti is 4 years old. | LeifCarrotson wrote: | Same 4-year age for the i7-8700k. It's true that it's about | half as fast as a modern Ryzen 7 5800X or brand-new Intel | i7-11700K, and if you could get a new Nvidia 3080 or AMD RX | 6900-XT they'd have a similar doubling in speed, but it's | not ancient. | | Regardless, does the difference between 5 minutes or 10 | minutes for 10,000 pixels really matter? It still means | that you're running on the order of a hundred thousand | operations per pixel; what can you possibly need to do that | requires that much processing? | throwaway2568 wrote: | This article is not that clear (there is no frequency shift | occuring). As others say, the authors are using speckle imagery, | which relies on the wavevector of the illuminating beam (rather | than the frequency). By adding the hyperbolic metamaterial the | authors can access wavevectors beyond the diffraction limit, so | that once they do the appropriate prost processing achieve super | resolution imagery. | | It's not directly related but reciprocal space and Fourier | imaging is quite interesting for those that are not aware of it | (such as estimating the size of a crystal lattice by looking at | the diffraction pattern) | dekhn wrote: | Most computer folks are actually unaware that physicists were | doing fourier transforms using optics long before the FFT | existed. You can do physical convolutions using lenses. | N1H1L wrote: | Yes - the technique is called ptychography [0] and there have | been several recent electron microscopy papers too | demonstrating how this technique (image reconstruction from | Fourier space patterns) can reach beyond instrumental | resolution limits [1, 2]. | | _References_ : | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptychography | | [1] 2018 Nature Paper: | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0298-5 arXiv | version: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04630 | | [2] 2021 Science Paper: | https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6544/826 arXiv | version: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00465 | mountainboy wrote: | Cool, and only about 90 years after Royal Raymond Rife. | whatshisface wrote: | The title "light-shrinking material" makes it sound like they are | adding a layer of something that turns optical wavelengths into | UV, but there's a mention of scattering and reconstruction that | makes it sound like more might be involved. | _Microft wrote: | I think you are thinking of oil immersion (microscopy) there. | They are using a meta material as a superlens though which | allows to work around the diffraction limit. | | Edit: they seem to be improving an already known technique | called "structured illumination microscopy". For that, the | sample is illuminated with a light pattern (here: a speckle | pattern) and the phase of the light is shifted in the process. | After collecting various images, an image of better resolution | can be computed. Their improvement seems to be to use a | particular meta material that allows to capture far more | spatial detail than otherwise. | | Links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_immersion , | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superlens , | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmonic_metamaterial#Hyperbo... | , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system , | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution_microscopy#St... | Narew wrote: | > As light passes through, its wavelengths shorten and scatter | to generate a series of random high-resolution speckled | patterns. | | Speckle allow random illumination with small resolution. They | reconstruct several images with differente speckle pattern to | obtain better resolution on the object | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-06-01 23:00 UTC)