Category: Quantum Imaging

You may not believe it the next time you come down with a cold, but viruses are small. In fact, at tens to hundreds of nanometers, they belong to the quantum realm. As a result, they typically push the limits of electron microscopes. That explains why only a small fraction of the large variety of…

While you probably do not have a scanning tunneling microscope installed in your kitchen, chances are you do have another device that is equally dependent on the effect of quantum tunneling. At the heart of your average smoke detector is an ionization source used to detect the presence of smoke particles. The source is typically…

Since the seventeenth century, the ordinary optical microscope has been used to observe objects too small to detect with the naked eye. It uses lenses to bend visible light and create magnified images of these small structures. Its invention brought about breakthroughs in many branches of science. However, since an electromagnetic wave can only resolve…

Many types of medical imaging techniques use quantum physics to reveal, diagnose, or examine disease in the human body. The first application came a mere two months after the German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the X-ray in 1895. X-rays are produced when a beam of highly energetic electrons is directed onto a sold metal target.…

Throughout this book, we’ve paid many a visit to the so-called “quantum realm,” where particles smaller than a speck of dust begin to demonstrate all the lovely features that we have studied so far. It should be no surprise, then, that one of the most successful applications of quantum physics has been to the imaging…