The most powerful microscopes are have limited detail when they observe living cells, but a quantum trick with laser light has allowed researchers to overcome those limits
You’ve probably seen images of scientists peering down a microscope, looking at objects invisible to the naked eye. Indeed, microscopes are indispensable to our understanding of life.
They are just as indispensable to biotechnology and medicine, for instance in our response to diseases such as COVID-19. However, the best light microscopes have hit a fundamental barrier – the bright laser light used to illuminate tiny objects can also destroy them.
In research published in Nature today, our team of Australian and German researchers has shown that quantum technologies offer a solution. We built a quantum microscope that can more gently probe biological samples, which allowed us to observe biological structures that would otherwise be impossible to see.
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Turbulence trouble
Illustration of Jupiter s Great Red Spot. Credit:
Mark Garlick / Getty Images.
“When I meet God,” physicist Werner Heisenberg allegedly once said, “I’m going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he’ll have an answer for the first.”
Although the quote is almost certainly fictional, it captures the sheer frustration many physicists feel about turbulence: the complex, chaotic, unpredictable flows in fluids.
This phenomenon surrounds us: swirling gases in the atmosphere disrupting our flights; the movement of rivers around rocks; the flow of blood through our arteries. We also see it on cosmic scales, explains quantum physicist Warwick Bowen from the University of Queensland (UQ), from gas flowing in galaxy clusters to the Great Red Spot – a massive cyclone on Jupiter.