Label-free chemical nano-imaging in dense molecular environments has remained a long-standing challenge. STROBE Thrust lead Markus Raschke led a team of academic and national laboratory scientists from LBNL, Boulder and Berkeley to speed-up scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) by a factor of 10! This remarkable achievement allowed the team to image the surface shape and chemistry of biological samples, including mollusk shells, with nanometer spatial resolution.
