Room-temperature sub-diffraction-limited plasmon laser by total internal reflection

Ren-Min Ma, Rupert F. Oulton, Volker J. Sorger, Guy Bartal & Xiang Zhang
Nature Materials (2010) published online 19 December 2010

“Plasmon lasers are a new class of coherent optical amplifiers that generate and sustain light well below its diffraction limit. Their intense, coherent and confined optical fields can enhance significantly light–matter interactions and bring fundamentally new capabilities to bio-sensing, data storage, photolithography and optical communications.”

The desk top microscope just keeps getting better and better, contributing to the rapid advancements of mediocal knowledge. For every click down into the infintisimal, the scale of information expands exponentionally.

For those who think we just about know it all, chance buy a new microscope. Bio-medicine intersects with physics more and more. There lies an entirely new reality as medical science probes the molecular level and beyond --- below the light defraction limit --- into a world of atoms, particles and quantum mechanics.