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Phantom images of molecules

19.12.2020

Engineers and scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed and built a new X-ray microscope that takes advantage of the strange features of the mysterious world of quantum physics. Thanks to this, the new microscope makes it possible to obtain "phantom images" of biomolecules in the highest resolution, exposing them to a lower dose of harmful radiation.

X-ray microscopes are very useful tools when it comes to taking high-resolution images of various molecules, materials, and the like. However, a sufficiently high level of hard X-ray radiation is usually detrimental and fatal to the samples under study, if these samples are viruses, bacteria and cells of living tissues. Reducing the radiation dose is one way to solve this problem, but an undesirable side effect of this is a decrease in image resolution.

Conventional X-ray microscopes use a single beam of photons that passes through the sample under study and hits a sensor below. In the new quantum microscope, the X-ray beam is split into two beams and exactly half of the radiation dose passes through the sample. And yet, both beams are involved in the measurements and in the imaging process, connected with the help of the “ghostly” phenomenon of quantum entanglement, which at one time amazed even Albert Einstein.

Quantum entanglement is about creating a quantum bond between two particles. At the same time, the invisible force of this bond is so strong that a change in the state of one of the particles will instantly lead to a similar change in the state of the second bound particle, despite the distance separating them, which can be arbitrarily large. This effect implies that quantum information can be transmitted at many times the speed of light, and this was the reason why Einstein could not believe and accept the phenomenon of quantum entanglement for a long time.

In the beam splitter, pairs of entangled photons are simultaneously produced. One of the beams, as usual, passes through the sample and delivers information to the first sensor. But quantum entanglement causes the photons of the second beam to also change their state without coming into contact with the sample, so the second beam also becomes a carrier of additional information about the sample, which is extracted using the second sensor.

The process of such shooting is called "phantom shooting" and until recently it was realized only with the help of visible light photons. Some engineering and scientific solutions have made it possible to adapt this method to X-rays, and now with the help of a new microscope it is possible to take pictures of biological samples with dimensions less than 10 nanometers without destroying their fragile structure.

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