Quantum computer microscope is set to significantly improve electron microscopy using few single electrons

"... A team ... has now developed a way to make use of the quantum information carried by electrons in an electron microscope: The electron beam is coupled to a quantum computer, opening up entirely new possibilities for working with the quantum information of the electrons.

This is particularly important for sensitive samples that cannot be bombarded with arbitrarily large numbers of electrons. ..."

"... “Today, we can image tiny details on the atomic scale,” ... “However, this requires a large number of electrons. And not every sample can be exposed to so many electrons without being damaged. This is often a problem, particularly when imaging biological samples such as individual proteins.” ...

If, however, more information can be extracted from each individual electron than before, a smaller number of electrons is sufficient. The team has now found a method to achieve precisely this ..."

From the abstract:

"Freely propagating electrons may serve as quantum probes that can become coherently correlated with other quantum systems, offering access to advanced metrological resources.

We propose a setup that coherently couples free electrons in an electron microscope to a trapped-ion quantum processor, enabling non-destructive, quantum-coherent detection and the accumulation of information across multiple electrons. Our analysis shows that single electrons can induce resolvable qubit excitations, establishing a platform for practical applications such as quantum-enhanced, dose-efficient electron microscopy."

Quantum computer microscope is set to significantly improve electron microscopy

The Quantum Computer Microscope (original news release) "A new invention is set to significantly improve electron microscopy: a small quantum computer is integrated directly into the microscope."

Coupling free electrons to a trapped-ion quantum computer (preprint, open access)

Sun Revealed In Stunning Clarity With Record-Breaking New Images

Update of 8/6/2026: "Telescope captures sun's surface in sharpest detail ever Researchers using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii have captured the highest-resolution images yet of the sun's outer shell. The images reveal feathery and rippling patterns caused by magnetized plasma ..." IEEE USA Smartbrief

Amazing stuff! We still know so little about the sun! What if the solar activity and cycles of the sun is the main cause of global warming/climate change?

(721) Sun Revealed In Stunning Clarity With Record-Breaking New Images | WION originals - YouTube

Source

Gallery Images from the Inouye

Researchers break diffraction barrier in super-resolution microscopy

Good news! This could be a breakthrough!

"... have developed a groundbreaking super-resolution imaging technology that allows scientists to visualize molecular structures with sub-angstrom-level localization precision — three orders of magnitude beyond the nanometer limits of standard fluorescent dyes — while drastically simplifying the imaging process.

Unlike traditional dyes that fade rapidly under illumination and limit data collection, the platform, called U-STORM (Upconversion enabled Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy) utilizes a new class of compositionally engineered upconverting nanoparticles (UCNPs) that blink spontaneously and indefinitely. ..."

From the abstract:

"Single-molecule localization microscopy enables high-resolution biological imaging, but its precision is limited by the rapid photobleaching of conventional fluorophores.

Multicolour imaging is further constrained by the need for spectrally distinct dyes requiring separate excitations or sequential acquisition.

Here we show that small (~10 nm) upconverting nanoparticles can be compositionally tuned to exhibit spontaneous, sustained blinking under single near-infrared excitation without optical or chemical modulation.

By adjusting sensitizer (Yb3+)–emitter (Tm3+/Er3+) ratios, we identify a regime with intrinsic ON–OFF switching and low duty cycles (~0.9%) without photobleaching or statistical aging, enabling repeated localizations and sub-ångström precision (0.62 Å over 88,000 localizations) in upconversion-enabled stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy.

By elucidating the underlying physical mechanism of this blinking, we engineered blue- and red-emitting probes for multicolour upconversion-enabled stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy.

This technique enables the resolution of tightly packed UCNPs and the visualization of epidermal growth factor receptor dimers and multimers on cell membranes at single-protein resolution, all achieved with a simple optical setup without imaging buffers."

MIT and Broad Institute researchers break diffraction barrier in super-resolution microscopy | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "New U-STORM imaging technology lets scientists view molecular structures in subatomic detail — about 1,000 times clearer than traditional dyes — while making the microscope process much simpler."

Spontaneous and indefinite blinking in upconverting nanoparticles for ångström-precision multicolour super-resolution imaging (open access)

Fig. 1: U-STORM workflow and route to ångström-level precision.

Fig. 3: Super-resolution imaging with high precision and accuracy using blue-emitting U-STORM probe.

Latest advances in super-resolution optical microscopy to the level of individual atoms. Really!

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 “seating chart” for atoms helps locate their positions in materials | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

A Bayesian approach towards atomically-precise localization in fluorescence microscopy (open access)

Fig. 1: DIGIT concept.

New sonar tool is a ‘game changer’ for mapping the seafloor

Amazing stuff! Terra incognita! What lurks beneath!

"An emerging sonar technology that scans the seafloor at centimeter-scale resolution is dazzling researchers with its potential. Commercial synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) devices, originally developed by the military to identify explosive mines, are now being deployed by scientists ...

Only a Rhode Island–size patch of the world’s deep-sea floors has been observed up close, according to a study ... That imaged area is likely to grow with the adoption of SAS, which can efficiently reveal fine details in wide swaths of the sea floor, unmasking its biology and geology. ...

SAS is analogous to the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems on satellites that are increasingly being used to map Earth’s surface. In SAR, a moving beam source focuses multiple “pings” on a single point on Earth’s surface. The radar reflections are stitched together to create a picture equivalent to one taken by a much larger aperture antenna. SAS does the same thing with sound instead of radio waves. ..."

From the abstract:

"Despite the importance of visual observation in the ocean, we have imaged a minuscule fraction of the deep seafloor. Sixty-six percent of the entire planet is deep ocean (≥200 m), and our data show that we have visually observed less than 0.001%, a total area approximately a tenth of the size of Belgium. Data gathered from approximately 44,000 deep-sea dives indicate that we have also seen an incredibly biased sample.

Sixty-five percent of all in situ visual seafloor observations in our dataset were within 200 nm of only three countries: the United States, Japan, and New Zealand. Ninety-seven percent of all dives we compiled have been conducted by just five countries: the United States, Japan, New Zealand, France, and Germany. This small and biased sample is problematic when attempting to characterize, understand, and manage a global ocean."

New sonar tool is a ‘game changer’ for mapping the sea floor | Science | AAAS "Devices that mimic giant acoustic cameras can spy animal burrows, explosive mines, and metallic deposits"

How little we’ve seen: A visual coverage estimate of the deep seafloor (open access, this article is not really related to SAS)

A shipwreck off the coast of Nantucket in Massachusetts was imaged with synthetic aperture sonar.

Photons from nuclear clock transition are seen at long last

Amazing stuff! Mind boggling! Clocks can never be precise enough! Better clocks lead to better theories and new discoveries.

Towards the next generation of atomic clocks!

"... The most accurate clocks today are based on optically trapped ensembles of atoms such as strontium or ytterbium. Highly stable lasers are locked into resonance with the frequencies of specific atomic transitions, and the laser oscillations effectively behave like pendulum swings – albeit with much higher frequencies and therefore greater precision. These clocks can be stable to within 1 part in 1020, which means that they will be out by just 10 ms after 13.7 billion years of operation – the age of the universe. ...
In search of ever greater precision and deeper insights, in 2003 ... proposed that a clock could be produced by interrogating not electronic energy levels of atoms but nuclear energy levels. ...

Such a nuclear clock would be extremely well isolated from external noise. “An atom is something like 10-10 m [across]; a nucleus is something like 10-14 or 10-15 m,”... “The nucleus is a much smaller antenna for the environment and is thus much less prone to shifts.”

A nuclear clock might therefore be an excellent probe of hypothetical, very tiny temporal variations in the values of fundamental constants such as the fine structure constant, which quantifies the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. Any such changes would point to physics beyond the Standard Model. ..."

"Atomic clocks are the world’s most precise timekeepers. Based on periodic transitions between two electronic states of an atom, they can track the passage of time with a precision as high as one part in a quintillion, meaning that they won’t lose or gain a second over 30 billion years – more than twice the age of the Universe. 
In a paper published today in Nature, an international team at CERN’s nuclear physics facility, ISOLDE, reports a key step towards building a clock that would be based on a periodic transition between two states of an atomic nucleus – the nucleus of an isotope of the element thorium, thorium-229. ...
“ISOLDE is currently one of only two facilities in the world that can produce actinium-229 isotopes,” ..."

From the abstract:

"The radionuclide thorium-229 features an isomer with an exceptionally low excitation energy that enables direct laser manipulation of nuclear states. It constitutes one of the leading candidates for use in next-generation optical clocks. This nuclear clock will be a unique tool for precise tests of fundamental physics. Whereas indirect experimental evidence for the existence of such an extraordinary nuclear state is substantially older, the proof of existence has been delivered only recently by observing the isomer’s electron conversion decay. The isomer’s excitation energy, nuclear spin and electromagnetic moments, the electron conversion lifetime and a refined energy of the isomer have been measured. In spite of recent progress, the isomer’s radiative decay, a key ingredient for the development of a nuclear clock, remained unobserved. Here, we report the detection of the radiative decay of this low-energy isomer in thorium-229 (229mTh). By performing vacuum-ultraviolet spectroscopy of 229mTh incorporated into large-bandgap CaF2 and MgF2 crystals at the ISOLDE facility at CERN, photons of 8.338(24) eV are measured, in agreement with recent measurements and the uncertainty is decreased by a factor of seven. The half-life of 229mTh embedded in MgF2 is determined to be 670(102) s. The observation of the radiative decay in a large-bandgap crystal has important consequences for the design of a future nuclear clock and the improved uncertainty of the energy eases the search for direct laser excitation of the atomic nucleus."

Photons from nuclear clock transition are seen at long last – Physics World The first direct measurement has been made of a thorium-229 nuclear transition that could potential

ISOLDE takes a solid tick forward towards a nuclear clock (primary news source) The observation at CERN’s nuclear physics facility of a long-sought decay of the thorium-229 nucleus in a solid-state system is a key step towards a clock that could outclass today’s most precise atomic clocks

Observation of the radiative decay of the 229Th nuclear clock isomer (no public access)

The ISOLDE facility at CERN

Scientists make quantum spectrometers a million times more sensitive

Amazing stuff with potential!

"A team of quantum engineers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has developed a new tool for measuring the ‘spin’ of subatomic particles with an unprecedented level of accuracy. The device, which is over a million times more sensitive than conventional spin resonance spectrometers, could revolutionize the fields of chemistry, biology, physics, and medicine. ...
conventional spectrometers require billions or trillions of spin measurements to generate accurate readings, making it difficult to measure microscopic samples, two-dimensional materials, and high-quality solar cells. ..."

"... In fields of research such as chemistry, biology, physics and medicine, the tool that is used to measure spins is called a spin resonance spectrometer. Normally, commercially produced spectrometers require billions to trillions of spins to get an accurate reading, but ... were able to measure spins of electrons in the order of thousands, meaning the new tool was about a million times more sensitive.
This is quite a feat, as there are a whole range of systems that cannot be measured with commercial tools, such as microscopic samples, two-dimensional materials and high-quality solar cells, which simply have too few spins to create a measurable signal. ...

While other highly sensitive spectrometers using superconducting circuits had been developed in the past, they required multiple components, were incompatible with magnetic fields and had to be operated in very cold environments using expensive “dilution refrigerators”, which reach temperatures down to 0.01 Kelvin.

In this new development, A/Prof. Pla says he and the team managed to integrate the components on a single chip.

“Our new technology integrates several important parts of the spectrometer into one device and is compatible with relatively large magnetic fields. This is important, since measure the spins they need to be placed in a field of about 0.5 Tesla, which is ten thousand times stronger than the earth’s magnetic field.

“Further, our device operated at a temperature more than 10 times higher than previous demonstrations, meaning we don’t need to use a dilution refrigerator.” ..."

From the abstract (Don't ask me what that all means! 😊 I don't like abstracts that are written only for area specialists to understand!):
"The use of superconducting microresonators together with quantum-limited Josephson parametric amplifiers has enhanced the sensitivity of pulsed electron spin resonance (ESR) measurements by more than four orders of magnitude. So far, the microwave resonators and amplifiers have been designed as separate components due to the incompatibility of Josephson junction–based devices with magnetic fields. This has produced complex spectrometers and raised technical barriers toward adoption of the technique. Here, we circumvent this issue by coupling an ensemble of spins directly to a weakly nonlinear and magnetic field–resilient superconducting microwave resonator. We perform pulsed ESR measurements with a 1-pL mode volume containing 6 × 107 spins and amplify the resulting signals within the device. When considering only those spins that contribute to the detected signals, we find a sensitivity of 2.8×10^3spins/Hz√

 for a Hahn echo sequence at a temperature of 400 mK. In situ amplification is demonstrated at fields up to 254 mT, highlighting the technique’s potential for application under conventional ESR operating conditions."

Scientists make quantum spectrometers a million times more sensitive

Quantum engineers have designed a new tool to probe nature with extreme sensitivity

In situ amplification of spin echoes within a kinetic inductance parametric amplifier (open access)

Fig. 1. Device design and resonator characterization.

Artificial intelligence powers record-breaking all-in-one miniature spectrometers

Amazing stuff! This could be a major breakthrough! The possibilities are enormous! Will your next smartphone also come with a spectrometer?

"... Now, an international team of researchers, including the University of Cambridge, have designed a miniaturised spectrometer that breaks all current resolution records, and does so in a much smaller package, thanks to computational programmes and artificial intelligence.
The new miniaturised devices could be used in a broad range of sectors, from checking the quality of food to analysing starlight or detecting faint clues of life in outer space. ...
The result is an all-in-one spectrometer thousands of times smaller than current commercial systems. At the same time, it offers performance comparable to benchtop systems. In other words, these new spectrometers will provide portable alternatives to uncover otherwise invisible information, without even going into the lab. ...
The detector uses van der Waals heterostructures – a ‘sandwich’ of different ingredients, including graphene, molybdenum disulfide, and tungsten diselenide. Different combinations of material components enable light detection beyond the visible spectrum, as far as the near-infrared region. This means the spectrometer detects more than just colour, enabling applications such as chemical analysis and night vision. ..."

"Optical spectrometers can measure the intensity of light with spectral resolution. Although laboratory benchtop spectrometer systems offer high resolution and wide spectral range, their large size hampers them from being more widely adopted for general consumer products, such as wearable electronics. The miniaturization of spectrometers is crucial to making them cheaper and easier to integrate with other devices, which can help expand the use of such a powerful analytical tool. There is a wide range of potential applications for cheap and small-sized spectrometers, from detecting counterfeit pharmaceuticals and banknotes to monitoring specific biosignals. On page 296 of this issue, Yoon et al. (1) present a design for an ultraminiaturized spectrometer with performance approaching that of benchtop systems."

"Miniaturizing spectrometers

High-resolution spectrometry tends to be associated with bench-sized machines. Recent efforts on computational spectrometers have shown that this physical footprint can be shrunk by using nanowires and two-dimensional (2D) materials, but these devices are often associated with limited performance. Yoon et al. developed a single-detector computational spectrometer using an electrically tunable spectral response of a single junction comprising 2D van der Waal materials (see the Perspective by Quereda and Castellanos-Gomez). The electrically tunable spectral response and high performance of the tiny detector are promising for the further development of computational spectrometers."

From the abstract:

"Miniaturized computational spectrometers, which can obtain incident spectra using a combination of device spectral responses and reconstruction algorithms, are essential for on-chip and implantable applications. Highly sensitive spectral measurement using a single detector allows the footprints of such spectrometers to be scaled down while achieving spectral resolution approaching that of benchtop systems. We report a high-performance computational spectrometer based on a single van der Waals junction with an electrically tunable transport-mediated spectral response. We achieve high peak wavelength accuracy (∼0.36 nanometers), high spectral resolution (∼3 nanometers), broad operation bandwidth (from ∼405 to 845 nanometers), and proof-of-concept spectral imaging. Our approach provides a route toward ultraminiaturization and offers unprecedented performance in accuracy, resolution, and operation bandwidth for single-detector computational spectrometers."

Artificial intelligence powers record-breaking all-in-one miniature spectrometers | University of Cambridge Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to replace optical and mechanical components, researchers have designed a tiny spectrometer that breaks all current resolution records.

An ultraminiaturized spectrometer (no public access) Scaling down spectrometers could allow their application in consumer devices.

Miniaturized spectrometers with a tunable van der Waals junction (no public access)

On-chip spectrometer on a fingertip