Eric Betzig

Eric Betzig is an American physicist who shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, which reveals details beyond conventional light-microscope resolution.

Stefan W. Hell: A German physicist who shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing super-resolved fluorescence microscopy. Hell independently developed a different route to surpassing conventional optical resolution.
Photoactivated localization microscopy: A super-resolution method that localizes individual photoactivated fluorescent molecules and combines their positions into an image. Betzig and Hess introduced PALM as a practical method for resolving structures below the diffraction limit.
Near-field scanning optical microscopy: An optical microscopy method that uses a probe near a sample to achieve resolution beyond the far-field diffraction limit. Betzig’s early work used near-field microscopy to overcome conventional resolution limits.
Cell biology: The study of cells, including their structures, functions, and interactions. Betzig’s methods let cell biologists examine structures too small for conventional optical resolution.
Super-resolution microscopy: Optical microscopy methods that resolve details beyond the conventional diffraction limit. Betzig’s PALM helped demonstrate that fluorescence microscopy could resolve nanoscale biological structures.
William E. Moerner: An American physicist whose single-molecule fluorescence studies enabled major advances in super-resolution microscopy. Moerner’s ability to detect individual molecules helped establish the groundwork for Betzig’s approach.
Fluorescence microscopy: Microscopy that forms images from light emitted by fluorescent molecules in a specimen. Betzig’s super-resolution methods build on fluorescence imaging.
Optical diffraction limit: The resolution bound imposed by diffraction in conventional far-field optical imaging. Betzig’s 1995 proposal outlined how sparse emitters could evade this apparent barrier.
Fluorescent protein: A protein that emits visible light after absorbing light of a suitable wavelength. Fluorescent proteins label cellular structures for imaging by PALM and related methods.
Diffraction-unlimited fluorescence imaging: Fluorescence imaging that distinguishes spatial details finer than the conventional optical diffraction limit. Betzig’s work helped make this once-impractical capability experimentally accessible.

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Stefan HellRelated: Betzig shared Hell’s Nobel Prize for a distinct route to fluorescence-microscopy super-resolution.