| We discuss the recent advances in superresolution (SR) optical microscopy in the 20nm range, ‘breaking’ the diffraction limit of 200nm. Even though electron microscopy (EM) has been very fruitfully applied to study cells with resolution down to nm range, such EM images are from specially prepared and sectioned thin slices of fixed cells. Imaging of what happens inside a living cell remains a challenge for which SR optical microscopy holds much promises. We will discuss our interdisciplinary effort at HKUST: why we want to do it, the challenges we face, the benefits we envision, and the prospects for the future.
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| Professor Michael Loy earned both his BSc (1966) and PhD (1971) degrees at the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 1993 as Professor of Physics and served as Dean of Science from 1998 to 2004 and from 2010 to 2012. He also served as Acting Head of Life Science Division from 2011 to 2012. Before joining HKUST, Professor Loy worked for more than 20 years at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in New York. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is also a member of the Optical Society of America.
Professor Loy's main research interests include nonlinear optical propagation effects, two-photon coherent transients, nonlinear optical studies of surfaces, the state-selective studies of molecule-surface interactions. Since 2012, he has been leading an interdisciplinary project on super-resolution imaging for biological applications, with faculty members from Physics, Chemistry and Life Science working together as a team. The project aims to achieve resolution down to the 20 nm range, a factor of 10 better than 200 nm, which is the current limit for optical microscopy. Since many intracellular organelles are in the range below 100nm, this is of great interests to researchers in Life Science.
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