A Quantum Microscope to Witness the Invisible!

Anushka Biswas

Power Engineering, UG2

For ever-striving scientists and researchers, the sky has never been the limit. Pushing the existing boundaries and constantly extending the frontiers of science into newer, wider domains is something that a group of researchers from the University of Queensland just did, a few months back. In a major scientific leap, which can have revolutionary repercussions in a myriad of diverse fields like biotechnology, medical imaging, nanotechnology, optics and quantum physics – the researchers have created a Quantum Microscope, which can reveal intricate structures that would otherwise be impossible to view with the available technologies.

Based on and being “the proof of the paradigm-changing potential” of the science of Quantum Entanglement, which Albert Einstein had termed as the “spooky interactions at a distance”, the sensors of the new Quantum Microscope can supersede existing, non-quantum technology. The traditional, light-based microscopes had changed our understanding by allowing us to peer into the complex structures of microscopic systems since their advent in the 17th century. Then the 2014 Nobel Prize honoured the development of a new set of laser microscopes (the best we have got till now).

But random photons hitting the detector introduces “noise” which lowers the sensitivity, resolution and speed of microscopes. Noise can be reduced by increasing the intensity of light (using lasers which are a billion times brighter than the Sun!) which ultimately, fries the delicate cells under study. This limitation has been removed by the Quantum Microscope using Quantum Entanglement.

But what is Quantum Entanglement?

It is a phenomenon at the quantum scale (involving atoms and subatomic particles) in which two particles get “entangled” (linked) and always mirror each other’s properties – the actions performed on one of them will affect the other, irrespective of the distance between them, even if they’re light-years apart! Using this phenomenon, if we probe one photon, then we can extract information about its other, “entangled” partner photon. Although physicists are still in dark regarding how it happens but the consoling fact that it really does, enabled us to harness it in microscopy.

Quantum physicist, Warwick Bowen and his team, used a type of coherent Raman-scattering microscope (existing technology) with two laser light sources and passed one of them through a non-linear crystal which “squeezed” the light and coupled the photons into correlated pairs, thereby lowering the intensity of light and decreasing its noise, leading to more precise imaging, up to 35% sharper than present microscopes!

The development of Quantum Microscope has opened up broad new vistas for deeper research in quantum physics and computing, that will lead to new technological revolutions having far-reaching impacts on our lives.

Artist’s impression of the Quantum Microscope in action.

Credit: University of Queensland

The Quantum Microscope.

Credit: University of Queensland