In 1873, the German physicist Ernst Abbe realized that the resolution of optical imaging instruments, including telescopes and microscopes, is fundamentally limited by the diffraction of light.

When a laser beam is incident on a narrow opaque object such as a fine wire or a strand of hair, the resulting diffraction pattern is similar to the diffraction pattern of a slit of the same width as ...

What is the Diffraction Limit? The diffraction limit is a fundamental barrier in optical microscopy that sets the minimum size of features that can be resolved using conventional light microscopes. It ...

Q: What are diffraction gratings? A diffraction grating is an optical component for spectroscopy that splits light into different wavelengths. A typical diffraction grating has thousands of ...

A U.K.-Portuguese research group is proposing a new solar cell design based on diffraction gratings – optical components that split and diffract light into several beams. They claim this could ...