KEYNOTE: Quantum-Enhanced Superresolution Confocal Microscopy

Far-field optical microscopy beyond the Abbe diffraction limit is already a reality. Yet, while Abbe's theory was based on classical physics, quantum mechanical phenomena were only very recently used for improving the performance of microscopes. Oron reviews progress in this area and shows how quantum mechanics can increase the resolution of a standard confocal microscope fourfold, alongside a twofold axial resolution increase by harnessing the quantum phenomenon of fluorescence anti-bunching and its classical analog of fluorescence intermittency. The hardware and software advancements that are required to turn quantum enhancements into ubiquitous tools in biological imaging are becoming readily available. Quantum-enhanced superresolution confocal microscopy offers a unique pathway toward confocal imaging with increased performance, without sacrificing the simplicity and ease of the confocal microscope.

About the presenter
Dan Oron, Ph.D., earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from the Hebrew University in 1994. He earned his master's degree in physics from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 1998 and his doctorate, also in physics, from the Weizmann Institute of Science in 2005 under the guidance of Yaron Silberberg. He then conducted postgraduate research with Uri Banin at the Hebrew University for two years. In April 2007, he joined the staff at the Weizmann Institute, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Molecular Chemistry and Materials Science. His main research interests are at the interface between light and the nanoscale, studying both the interaction of light with nanostructured materials - mostly inorganic and hybrid semiconductor nanocrystals - and optical superresolution methods harnessing both quantum and classical fluctuations in light emission, and the optics of biological nanostructured materials.