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What Do we Really See? Resolution in Near-Field Optical Microscopy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2020

M.S. Isaacson*
Affiliation:
School of Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York14853
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Extract

Six years ago there was a symposium held at the 1991 EMS A meeting to discuss the issue of “Resolution in the Microscope”.1 In this paper, we will look at resolution in near-field imaging, a blossoming field, and see whether any of our concepts have changed.

It has been only within the last decade that the concept of super-resolution microscopy in the near field has been vigorously pursued and experimentally demonstrated. (For reviews on the subject, the reader is referred to the proceedings of the second and third international conferences on near field optics.) However, as in most areas of microscopy, the idea is not new, but rather rediscovered after decades of dormancy.

The idea of optical resolution unhindered by far-field diffraction limitations was conceived more than a half-century ago by E.H. Synge4 in a paper entitled “A Suggested Method for Extending Microscopy Resolution into the Ultra-Microscope Regime”.

Type
The Limits of Image Resolution: Seeing is Believing
Copyright
Copyright © Microscopy Society of America 1997

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References

1.Sarikaya, M., ed. “Resolution in the Microscope”, Ultramicroscopy 47(1-3 ) (1992) 1306.10.1016/0304-3991(92)90181-ICrossRefGoogle Scholar
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9. The author thanks the organizers of this symposium for giving him the opportunity to reflect on these issues.Google Scholar