Re: Light reading on optical nanoscopy

Posted by Steffen Dietzel on
URL: http://confocal-microscopy-list.275.s1.nabble.com/Light-reading-on-optical-nanoscopy-tp7578894p7579003.html

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On 23.08.2012 13:17, Peng Xi wrote:
> Oh my dear, I will be driven crazy Alby... I cannot read Germany. But I
> will surely list it there. :)
> Peng
>

Peng,

concerning ultramicroscopy, you can start with the Nobel lecture given
by Richard Zsigmondy, it can be found here:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1925/zsigmondy-lecture.html

While this is obviously not the original paper, it has the advantage of
being in English. It also contains some images.

A better quality image of a Spaltultramikroskop than in the nobel
lecture can be found online in the paper
W. Gebhardt: Aus optischen und mechanischen Werkstätten I. In:
Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Mikroskopie. 24, Nr. 4, 1907, S. 396–421,
more precisely on page 405, online available here:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/24714#page/473/mode/1up

At the time, an Ultramikroskop was any microscope that would use dark
field illumination to study particles smaller than the resolution limit
(the so-called "Ultramikronen") while the specific type developped by
Siedentopf and Zsigmondy was called a Spaltultramikroskop: It used a
slit (=Spalt) for illumination, actually quite similar to todays SPIM,
except that the readout was a darkfield image, not fluorescence. So,
don't get confused by the two terms when you brush up your German,
sometimes recent texts imply that every Ultramikroskop was a
Spaltultramikroskop but that was not the case.

Keep in mind that these microscopes did not beat the Abbe limit in terms
of resolution. You could detect and study particles smaller than the
resolution limit, yes, but you could not resolve them if they were
closer together than the Abbe limit. This is surely a big difference to
todays super-resolution techniques.

Steffen

--
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Steffen Dietzel, PD Dr. rer. nat
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Walter-Brendel-Zentrum für experimentelle Medizin (WBex)
Head of light microscopy

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