Beating the diffraction limit--Don't believe everything you hear in Physics 163!

Standard microscopes cannot resolve features smaller than the wavelength of light, due to diffraction of light by the microscope aperture. This same phenomenon also limits the features that can be formed in conventional photolithography. In recent years, several techniques have been proposed for beating the diffraction limit in fluorescence microscopy, enabling the detection of cellular features down to 30 nm scales. I will describe two of these techniques and calculations that I've been performing for extending their capabilities. I will propose that one fluorescence imaging (Stimulated Emission Depletion) technique can be "inverted" to perform optical nanolithography with a conventional microscope, and show preliminary simulations of subwavelength nanolithography. I will also discuss the limits on image acquisition rates in a related technique (Stochastic Reconstruction Microscopy), and the dependence of the image acquisition rate on detection errors and image analysis algorithms.