A research group led by Assistant Professor Takafumi Tomita and Professor Kenji Ohmori at the Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, has developed a new microscopy technique called the Atom Camera, which uses a single ultracold atom at near absolute zero temperature trapped in an optical tweezer as a camera to visualize the intensity and polarization distributions of light at the nanometer (one-millionth of a millimeter) scale.

In this study, a single atom trapped by optical tweezer was successfully utilized as a scanning probe for imaging the fine structures of intensity and polarization distributions of light patterns with a spatial resolution beyond the diffraction limit of conventional optical microscopes. The results are published in Nature Communications.