The Landes Research Group at University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)

A wide range of biological and materials processes rely on nanoscale interfacial dynamics. Single molecule methods allow us to identify the chemical complexity of these interactions by revealing the underlying populations that form the ensemble measurement. In doing so, we can identify and tune the rare chemical populations that play a crucial role in reactivity.

The Abbe diffraction limit sets a lower bound of a few hundred nanometers for the size of objects we can observe with traditional optical microscopy. This limit is defined by light’s wavelength. Our lab develops new mathematical methods to break the Abbe diffraction limit and achieve spatial resolutions of just a few nanometers and time resolutions faster than traditional cameras frame times.