Swiss research institute sets precision world record

Precision world record at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) Keystone-SDA

The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villigen, northern Switzerland, has set a new world record for X-ray precision. Researchers peered inside a computer chip and obtained an image with a resolution of four nanometres.

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This is a first and a new world record, said the PSI on Friday, which collaborated with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the federal technology institute ETH Zurich and the University of Southern California to achieve this feat. Three-dimensional images of such high resolution enable advances in both information technology and the life sciences.

To obtain the image with a resolution of four nanometres (four millionths of a millimetre), the researchers used ptychography. “Ptychography is a computer process that combines many individual images into a single high-resolution image,” the PSI explained.

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By shortening the exposure time and optimising an algorithm, they managed to beat their own 2017 world record (15 nanometres). To achieve this result, they used X-rays and the PSI’s Swiss Light Source (SLS). The results of their work have been published in the specialist journal Nature.

Translated from French by DeepL/ts

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