SUPER-RESOLUTION MICROSCOPES

The diffraction limit of light, or Abbe limit, a floor fixed at around 0.2µm, has always posed an insurmountable barrier for photon observation. Indeed, below this limit, objects appear as mere blobs because the light reflected by each point cannot be distinguished from its neighbour. Although they use a beam of light just like confocal microscopes, «nanoscopes» or «super-resolution microscopes» illuminate fluorochromes randomly (stochastically) or selectively. Only the centres of the blobs are then considered to be the exact location of the object. Finally, stacking the images makes it possible to reconstruct an image of better resolution.