Recently, Yang Fan, a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led the successful development of the world's first high-spatiotemporal resolution stimulated Brillouin microscope, which improved the imaging speed by two orders of magnitude while maintaining excellent imaging quality and high spectral specificity. For the first time, three-dimensional mechanical imaging with sub-millisecond time resolution and sub-micron space resolution was achieved internationally, providing an important tool for mechanical research in life sciences. The relevant results were recently published in the international academic journal Nature Photonics.

On August 8, the reporter learned from the Anhui Quantum Computing Engineering Research Center that the joint stock company of Genyuan Quantum Computing Technology (Hefei), the University of Science and Technology of China and the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, successfully realized the world's first application of drug molecular property prediction based on quantum edge coding technology, and completed the real machine verification on our country's autonomous superconducting quantum computer "Genyuan Wukong". This technology is like a "quantum microscope" for drug research and development. The relevant research results were published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling.

Imagine scientists observing a living cell in real time in the laboratory under the stimulation of drugs, and every tiny wrinkle on the cell membrane is clearly visible - this magical scene is happening in the laboratory of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The world's first high-space-time resolution Brillouin microscope developed by Yang Fan's team of researchers allows humans to capture the mechanical dynamic process of the microscopic world for the first time with sub-millisecond (millionth of a second) time accuracy and sub-micron (one-thousandth of a hair) space accuracy.

The team designed a special light source with a wavelength of 780 nanometers, with a peak power of up to 267 watts, but with a low duty cycle design, the average power is only 30 milliwatts. With the self-developed high-noise suppression self-balancing detection scheme, the system can suppress noise interference of more than 31 decibels to ensure the purity of the signal. In practice, it only takes 200 microseconds to image each pixel, which is 100 times faster than the traditional Brillouin microscope.

Professor Dai Qionghai, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and dean of the Information Science TechAcademy of Tsinghua University, said that this is the first time in the world to achieve panoramic, long-term high-speed three-dimensional imaging observations on mammalian living organs. Its spatiotemporal cross-scale imaging capabilities provide a new perspective and tool for studying large-scale cell interaction behavior and promoting research in brain science, immunology, and pharmacy.

Brillouin microscopy is a new all-optical, non-contact, three-dimensional mechanical imaging technology with high spatial resolution. It can characterize the elastic modulus and viscosity of samples by analyzing the intermediate frequency shift and spectral width information of stimulated Brillouin scattering signals, and has great potential in biomechanics, oncology, ophthalmology and other fields. However, due to extremely weak signals and system limitations, traditional Brillouin imaging is slow and spectral resolution is limited, making it difficult to meet the needs of in vivo imaging and dynamic process monitoring.

In the past, microscopes were called "magnifying glass upgrades", which brought the micron-level world to the fore. But this upgrade is still a "snapshot" in the end. You can see the static structure, but you can't reach the ever-changing mechanical mystery inside. And this new device directly dries the microscope into a high-speed camera, and the imaging time of each pixel is shortened to 200 microseconds. Who still remembers the old problem in the field of optical imaging that "speed and accuracy cannot be both"? Chinese engineers directly said: Children make choices, we all want them!

In recent days, the global scientific community has been swept by a piece of Chinese news! The new ultrafast electron source developed by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the National Nanoscience Center has successfully broken through the bottleneck of traditional technology, allowing humans to "see" the instantaneous changes of atomic-scale particles for the first time. As soon as this achievement was published in Nature Materials, it was called "a revolution in the field of microscopy" by international colleagues.