Noble Prize:2 Americans, 1 German win 2014 Nobel prize for chemistry

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced  that for a long time, optical microscopy was held back by a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light.

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LONDON: The 2014 Nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to Eric Betzig from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Stefan W Hell from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Gottingen and William E Moerner from the University of Stanford for making "an optical microscope into a nanoscope".

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday that for a long time, optical microscopy was held back by a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light.

Helped by fluorescent molecules, the Nobel laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nano dimension.

The prize was given "for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy".