Graphene-Based Measurement Technique Boosts Optical Resolution

Researchers at the University of Göttingen have developed a new technique that exploits the unusual properties of graphene to optically measure extremely small distances — to the order of one ångström — for the first time. This could mean big things for superresolution microscopy. “Our method has enormous potential for superresolution microscopy because it allows us to localize single molecules with nanometer resolution not only laterally, as with earlier methods, but also with similar accuracy along the third direction,” said Arindam Ghosh, a Ph.D. student at Göttingen and first author of the paper. “[This] enables true three-dimensional optical imaging on the length scale of...