texas a&m scientists are using cutting-edge physics to create real-life medical breakthroughs professor of physics and biomedical engineering vladislav yakovlev phd and professor of physics and biological and agricultural engineering girish agarwal phd frs at texas a&m along with tian li phd assistant professor of physics at the university of tennessee at chattanooga recently developed a new type of microscope that takes advantage of quantum physics in order to dramatically increase the resolution of images the microscope takes the microscopy technique the texas a&m team is investigating yakovlev said relies on a process called brillouin scattering where a ray of light such as a laser is beamed into the sample being imaged the lights energy causes particles in the sample to vibrate and the specific frequencies of the vibrations reveal the positions and identities of the particles once this is known scientists can produce an image of the sample they are analyzing brillouin microscopy is a very special technique which can measure the mechanical properties of materials with very good special resolution so we can see inside cells yakovlev said for example in cancer cancer cells migrating from one side of the tissue to another or to a different tissue is driven by mechanical processes so understanding these processes is important the problem yakovlev said comes from an interaction between light and living cells when imaging anything the light waves are subject to random interferences from the environment that cause the pictures to be blurrier when it comes to brillouin microscopy which involves shining an intense light beam on a tiny sample these typically small interferences can render images completely useless to produce clearer images the scientists want to use more powerful light beams to drown out the environmental noise however if the light beams are too powerful scientists can risk damaging or killing cells when imaging them when we image cells we run into the problem where if we want to get more [clarity] we have to increase our lights intensity yakovlev said however if we increase the intensity past a certain point we start causing damage it seems like you cant get both [image clarity and undamaged cells] at the same time just because you want to increase intensity to reduce your noise but on the other hand if you increase intensity you damage your cells in order to solve this yakovlev said his team has built a device that takes advantage of a physical phenomenon known as entanglement in the minuscule world of quantum physics a group of particles in this case light waves can be generated in a manner so they effectively act as a single entity and actions that affect one wave will affect the others entanglement forms the basis for many cutting-edge technologies such as quantum computing and may be the key to birds ability to circumnavigate the globe a phenomenon noted by m suhail zubairy phd distinguished professor of physics at texas a&m in his book quantum mechanics for beginners [a] highly counterintuitive feature of quantum mechanics is that two or more objects can form an ‘entangled state zubairy writes [intuitively] if we have two objects such as two balls that are placed a large distance apart they are strictly independent of each other no matter what we do to one it cannot influence the other quantum mechanically we can form states for the two objects such that even when the two objects are very far from each other what we do to one object can influence the state of the other for yakovlev and his team its application lies in removing noise from microscopy images yakovlev said the new device his team has developed creates two entangled beams of light when interference affects one wave the effects are reflected in the entangled wave as well the device compares the two waves and finds extraneous interference patterns by analyzing the similarities in the waves once this is known the device removes the interference from both waves resulting in an image that is significantly clearer than an image produced by standard brillouin microscopy we are essentially making clever manipulation of light beams so we know that theres noise present in both beams and we know that these noises correlate yakovlev said we know both these laser beams are entangled and so we know that the noise is going to be the same for both of them so we can just find out the similarities and subtract them and thats how we make that clear image at the end li at the time a graduate student at the university of maryland was hired by texas a&m to build the laboratory for the device li said the device has successfully created microscopic images of several biological samples while also measuring their composition the whole lab was built from the ground up li said the lab is relatively new but we have the capability of generating quantum entangled light [for the device] we have already [imaged] cancer cells weve also tried the brain of the fruit fly marlan scully phd distinguished professor of physics and director of the institute for quantum science and engineering at texas a&m sponsored the research and provided the laboratory space scully said learning more about the applications and interactions between quantum physics and biology is a high priority for texas a&m combining what we know now about quantum mechanics and biology we come to a new field called quantum biology scully said thats the essence of what people like agarwal and yakovlev are trying to understand its a big function of my lab at [the institute for quantum science and engineering] in a press release published by texas a&ms college of engineering agarwal said the new device represented a breakthrough for medical imaging technology as well as the growing development of real-world applications for quantum physics its a new milestone in the capabilities of brillouin microscopy and imaging extensively used for biosystems agarwal said in the release it becomes part of an international effort to develop quantum sensors for diverse applications like brain imaging [and] biomolecule structure mapping this story was originally published by the battalion this story source was originally published by texas a&m arts & sciences share: