Eann Patterson, Chairperson of Mechanical Engineering, and Maurice Whelan of the European Commission DG Joint Research Centre, came up with a way to detect nanoparticles using a conventional optical microscope. While taking images of cells the two noticed the high-resolution images were interrupted with caustics--bright envelopes of light surrounding a dark center. The nanoparticles are much smaller than the microscope's normal resolution but the light interacting with the particles produced images many times larger than the structures themselves. Researchers in the U.S. and Italy are now using this technique to precisely capture the nanoscale. The procedure seems to have many advantages over traditional fluorescent labeling of particles with Patterson and Whelan's work suggesting the caustics can produce magnifications between one hundred and one thousand times the particle sizes.
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