neXt-Ray: a super-resolution light engine

How do we photograph viruses, or make movies of folding proteins? Many such structures, crucial to scientific and technological progress, are too small to be observed in a microscope. A fundamental physical principle called Abbe’s diffraction limit, linked to the wavelength of the visible light, prevents the optical resolution of objects smaller than approximately 200 nanometers. Currently, we trick the diffraction limit by attaching photo-sensitive labels to nano-sized objects and letting these tiny beacons of light reveal the underlying structures and shapes. But for rapid 3D super-resolution imaging without sample contamination or photo-bleaching, we must do something entirely different. By probing the sample with multiple narrow light beams, sculpted individually and adaptively in real time, we can compute the detailed shape and material parameters of objects beyond the diffraction limit. neXt-Ray will develop and use powerful mathematical models, light sculpting technology, and massively parallel data acquisition to rapidly and cheaply produce images of previously unseen nano-structures, nano-landscapes and nano-processes. The imaging will be label-free, with no moving parts, and thus fast, accurate, and non-destructive.