Saiki Laboratory - Pursuing the Ultimate Light Source with Near-Field Optics

At the Saiki Laboratory, we conduct research on near-field optics.

It is well known that a lens can be used to focus sunlight into a small spot. In the case of laser light, it can be focused into an even smaller spot, but the size of that spot is limited to about one micron, and it is impossible to make it any smaller. This is called the diffraction limit of light, a fundamental barrier that cannot be overcome as long as lenses are used. The performance of technologies such as the resolution of optical microscopes, the capacity of optical discs, and the feature size in photolithography are all limited by this diffraction limit of light. The field of research that deals with the technology to break through this barrier is called near-field optics.