A monolayer of organic molecules is placed in the focused light field and replies to this illumination by fluorescence, embedding all information about the invisible properties.
Münster researchers combine nano-optics and organic chemistry to measure complex light landscapes in the tight focus of a laser beam / Study published in "Nature Communications" Structured laser light has already opened up various different applications: it allows for precise material machining, trapping, manipulating or defined movement of small particles or cell compartments, as well as increasing the bandwidth for next-generation intelligent computing. If these light structures are tightly focused by a lens, like a magnifying glass used as burning glass, highly intense three-dimensional light landscapes will be shaped, facilitating a significantly enhanced resolution in named applications. These kinds of light landscapes has paved the way to pioneering applications as Nobel prize awarded STED microscopy. However, these nano-fields itself could not be measured yet, since components are formed by tight focusing which are invisible for typical measurement techniques. Up to now, this lack of appropriate metrological methods has impeded the breakthrough of nano-structured light landscapes as a tool for material machining, optical tweezers, or high-resolution imaging. A team around physicist Cornelia Denz of the Institute of Applied Physics and chemist Bart Jan Ravoo of the Center for Soft Nanoscience (SoN) at the University of Muenster successfully developed a nano-tomographic technique which is able to detect the typically invisible properties of nano-structured fields in the focus of a lens - without requiring any complex analysis algorithms or data post-processing.
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