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Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Seeing the nanoscale

Nature Nanotechnology volume 9, page 878 (2014)Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 03 December 2014

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Microscopy and nanotechnology, convention tells us, should not mix. The prefixes on the words themselves give some indication of their intrinsic disparity — a factor of one thousand separates the micro- and the nano-worlds. The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Stefan Hell, William Moerner and Eric Betzig for helping to bridge this gap with their development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.

Light is perhaps our most important connection with the world around us. Seeing is believing, or so they say, and direct visual observation remains our most trusted means of scientific discovery and experimental verification. But light has its limits. Diffraction means that a lens cannot focus a ray to a spot smaller than between one third and one half of the wavelength. This is just a few hundred nanometres for a conventional visible-light microscope: good enough to image whole cells, but not to get a detailed view of what is going on inside them.

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Change history

  • 06 November 2014

    In the version of this News & Views article previously published, the name of the Nobel Prize winner Eric Betzig was misspelt. Corrected in the online versions after print.

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  1. David Gevaux
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Gevaux, D. Seeing the nanoscale. Nature Nanotech 9, 878 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2014.267

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