[HN Gopher] Light-shrinking material lets ordinary microscope se...
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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]
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