Tuesday June 28, 2005
2 PM - 3:30 PM
ENG Z-50 Auditorium

Office Hours:
Wednesday June 29, 2005
3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
ENG B-16

"Taking Optical Microscopy to its Limits"
Prof. Vahid Sandoghdar
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

In this lecture I discuss the issue of resolution in optical microscopy and show that it is possible to achieve arbitrarily high resolution in optical studies if one exploits the spectral information about the system. I will present experimental results on high resolution spectroscopy and microscopy of single fluorescent molecules at low temperatures. Furthermore, I present spectral studies of the dipole-dipole coupling between two individual molecules and discuss the effect of such an interaction on the spatial information obtained in microscopic measurements. Applications of these studies to a wide range of fields, including biological imaging and quantum information processing will be pointed out.