Amazing stuff! This approach may seem to be a little bit to clever when you need to know the material's atomic configuration in advance! May this not defeat the purpose of discovery by microscopy? Is it a form of bootstrapping?
Even the name of this new approach, i.e. discrete grid imaging technique or DIGIT, suggests it is relying on the or presuming a grid structure of crystals. However, what if the grid is a fiction or invalid abstraction to some extent?
"... Only recently have scientists found ways to break this “diffraction limit,” to see features that are smaller than the wavelength of light. With new techniques known as super-resolution microscopy, scientists can see down to the scale of a single molecule. ...
scientists present a new computational method that enables optical microscopes to resolve individual atoms and zero in on their exact locations in a crystal structure.
The team’s new “discrete grid imaging technique,” or DIGIT, is a computational imaging approach that scientists can apply to optical data to calculate the most probable location of individual atoms based on a very important clue: the material’s known atomic configuration. As long as scientists have an idea of what a material’s physical atomic layout should be, they can use this layout as a sort of map to determine where specific atoms or features must be located. ...
With DIGIT, the team can now pinpoint individual atoms with a resolution of 0.178 angstroms. ... The technique enables optical microscopes to localize atomic-scale features in any material that has a known atomic pattern, such as crystalline materials or certain proteins with repeating molecular chains. ..."
From the abstract:
"Super-resolution microscopy has revolutionized the imaging of complex physical and biological systems by surpassing the Abbe diffraction limit. Recent advancements, particularly in single-molecule localization microscopy, have pushed localization below nanometer precision, by applying prior knowledge of correlated fluorescence emission from single emitters.
However, achieving a refinement from 1 nm to 1 Ångström demands a hundred-fold increase in collected photon signal. This quadratic resource scaling imposes a fundamental barrier in single-molecule localization microscopy, where the intense photon collection is challenged by photo-bleaching, prolonged integration times, and inherent practical constraints.
Here, we break this limit by harnessing the periodic nature of the atomic lattice structure. Applying this discrete grid imaging technique (DIGIT) in a quantum emitter system, we observe an exponential collapse of localization uncertainty once surpassing the host crystal’s atomic lattice constant. We further applied DIGIT to a large-scale quantum emitter array, enabling parallel positioning of each emitter through wide-field imaging. Collectively, these advancements establish DIGIT as a competitive tool for achieving unprecedented, precise measurements, ultimately paving the way to direct optical resolution of crystal and atomic features within quantum and biological systems."
A Bayesian approach towards atomically-precise localization in fluorescence microscopy (open access)
Fig. 1: DIGIT concept.
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