(See Near-field scanning optical microscope).

Until now near-field scanning optical microscopes have been the laggards of the field, said Eric Betzig, a physicist at A.T.&.

Then, individual N-V centers can be studied with standard optical microscopes or, better, near-field scanning optical microscopes having sub-micrometre resolution.

This allows near-field scanning optical microscopes to make out details as small as 1-500,000th of inch in width, but light leakages through the edges of the pinhole prevented finer resolution.

However, resolution below this theoretical limit can be achieved using optical near-fields (Near-field scanning optical microscope) or a diffraction technique called 4Pi STED microscopy.

Bell Laboratories researchers have already perfected near-field scanning optical microscopes capable of resolving images down to approximately 12 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, equal to about one 33-millionth of an inch.

The new microscope is a variation of an earlier device known as a near-field scanning optical microscope, where laser light passed through a tiny metal pinhole at the end of an optical fiber.

The use of shorter wavelengths of light, such as the ultraviolet, is one way to improve the spatial resolution of the optical microscope, as are devices such as the near-field scanning optical microscope.

The barrier of spatial resolution imposed by the very nature of light itself in conventional optical microscopy contributed significantly to the development of near-field optical devices, most notably the near-field scanning optical microscope, or NSOM.

These microscopes are known as near-field scanning optical microscopes, or N.S.O.M., and they may soon offer a wide variety of remarkable applications ranging from detailed movies of the inner workings of cells to vast increases in data storage capacity for the computer industry.

Soon after joining Chemla's group, Ha began working closely with scientist Shimon Weiss to build a near-field scanning optical microscope, a machine equipped with a small aperture and a short-pulse laser able to measure a material's properties with high time and spatial resolution.