Uploaded April 2015 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
In the FOM Annual Report 2014 physicists tell us about their research into light.
You can read the interviews here (in Dutch):
http://www.fom.nl/live/overfom/jaarverslagen/artikel.pag?objectnumber=292431&referpagina=14197
Who?
Michel Orrit is known internationally as a pioneer in the research area of single molecule physics. He has worked at the universities in Bordeaux and Göttingen. Since 2001 he works at Leiden University, where he leads the Single Molecule Optics research group.
Transcript:
'My name is Michel Orrit. I'm a chemical physicist. From me, light is the medium
that lets me observe single molecules.
In the early 1990s we showed it was optically possible to observe one single molecule. Before that was not considered feasible. Most colleagues I spoke to told me I was wasting my time and should do something else. "Don't try and see one molecule." Yet it turned out to be possible and not.. It's not only possible but also easy.
Basically, for us, light is a medium to study molecules and find out what they do. How they move and
about their surroundings. At the same time, with light we can change the temperature. We can also manipulate them, we can hold them with a bundle of light. We can move them and turn them. We can track their movements.
What we're trying to do now is o make the method more general. That's not only with good staining,
using good fluorescent molecules, but also with less fluorescent ones you can observe a single molecule. Even in a cell. For instance by using nano-antennas, for instance gold nanoparticles,
nanorods.. With that you can observe the fluorescence of cell molecules that do not fluoresce, and which would be much too dark in a standard single molecule experiment. But with the help of nano-antennas, it might just be possible.
It's one of the challenges we are trying to realise at present. The past shows that difficult experiments getting easier as equipment gets better. So that's in computers and in.. in thought. In the way you conceive your experiments and then perform them. The experiments we do now have nothing in common with what people did 10 years ago. Nor with what they did 20 years ago. It's all changed. The amount is smaller and the control is much better. It's very difficult to do new experiments at present. But I hope that in the next 10 years it will get a lot easier. Just as single
molecule detection got easier in 20 years. It's a standard method now.'
In the FOM Annual Report 2014 physicists tell us about their research into light.
You can read the interviews here (in Dutch):
http://www.fom.nl/live/overfom/jaarverslagen/artikel.pag?objectnumber=292431&referpagina=14197
Who?
Michel Orrit is known internationally as a pioneer in the research area of single molecule physics. He has worked at the universities in Bordeaux and Göttingen. Since 2001 he works at Leiden University, where he leads the Single Molecule Optics research group.
Transcript:
'My name is Michel Orrit. I'm a chemical physicist. From me, light is the medium
that lets me observe single molecules.
In the early 1990s we showed it was optically possible to observe one single molecule. Before that was not considered feasible. Most colleagues I spoke to told me I was wasting my time and should do something else. "Don't try and see one molecule." Yet it turned out to be possible and not.. It's not only possible but also easy.
Basically, for us, light is a medium to study molecules and find out what they do. How they move and
about their surroundings. At the same time, with light we can change the temperature. We can also manipulate them, we can hold them with a bundle of light. We can move them and turn them. We can track their movements.
What we're trying to do now is o make the method more general. That's not only with good staining,
using good fluorescent molecules, but also with less fluorescent ones you can observe a single molecule. Even in a cell. For instance by using nano-antennas, for instance gold nanoparticles,
nanorods.. With that you can observe the fluorescence of cell molecules that do not fluoresce, and which would be much too dark in a standard single molecule experiment. But with the help of nano-antennas, it might just be possible.
It's one of the challenges we are trying to realise at present. The past shows that difficult experiments getting easier as equipment gets better. So that's in computers and in.. in thought. In the way you conceive your experiments and then perform them. The experiments we do now have nothing in common with what people did 10 years ago. Nor with what they did 20 years ago. It's all changed. The amount is smaller and the control is much better. It's very difficult to do new experiments at present. But I hope that in the next 10 years it will get a lot easier. Just as single
molecule detection got easier in 20 years. It's a standard method now.'
