Photo credit: Kevin Lowder — File:WE Moerner.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY-SA 3.0
William E. Moerner
born 1953 · United States · Contemporary
Nobel Chemistry 2014
American physical chemist who opened single-molecule spectroscopy and helped make optical microscopy see beyond the diffraction limit.
Nobel Prize work
Moerner achieved the first optical detection of a single molecule in 1989 and later showed that the fluorescence of individual molecules can be switched and localized to nanometre precision. His single-molecule spectroscopy underpins super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, which images structures far below the diffraction limit.
Fields
Related topics
Fluorescence, NMR spectroscopy
Fluorescence reports excited-state emission; NMR reports nuclei in distinct magnetic and chemical environments.
Atomic-resolution microscopy (AFM, STM, imaging single bonds)
How scanning probe microscopes map surfaces atom by atom and, under carefully controlled conditions, reveal molecular structure and bond contrast.