Superresolution Microscopy
Colloquium in English
Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us that it is not possible to locate a point like object in a scattering experiment involving a single photon, with an accuracy better than the wavelength of the used radiation. If one can make N independent experiments, while the object does not move, one can then improve the resolution by a factor √N and with a few million optical photons obtain resolutions on the order of nanometers. Easy to say, not so easy to achieve. Over the last few years a number of clever techniques have emerged and brought a real revolution in optical microscopy. High resolution images of complex systems such as cells or axons have revealed unexpected structures and tracking of single molecules has been possible on time scales relevant to biological phenomena. This allowed for experimentations avoiding ensemble averages, capturing transient intermediates, characterizing heterogeneous behavior, probing ergodicity etc... This is an exploding new field of research, which this colloquium intends to illustrate with examples essentially issued from biological systems.
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