This page is very much a work in progress; we will be adding to it thoughout August and September. We solicit your ideas and are looking for partners.
If you're new to MRFM, you might want to take a look at the following nontechnical overviews (also the QSE FAQ Page and our AAAS 2004 presentation):
On the other hand, if you're already up-to-speed on quantum microscopy in general and MRFM in particular, just click the initiative that interests you most:
Frontiers of Quantum Microscopy I: Frontiers of Biology and Medicine II: Frontiers of Physics III: Frontiers of Quantum System Engineering
This capability—if achieved—will revolutionize both biology and medicine as thoroughly as the telescope revolutionized astronomy. What might an atomic-level description of a cell mean? Will it be a database, a catalog, a taxonomy? Will it be intellectual property, and if so, who can justly lay claim to it? Might it tell stories, and if so, what stories? And who will be telling them? Who will be listening? And will they be utopian or dystopian stories?
If you think these are interesting questions, and if you would like to begin exploring this new biological frontier, you might wish to participate in our first initiative: The Center for Quantum Biomicroscopy in Nanomedicine (CQBN).
Life on the frontier is rugged (particularly in the early days) and within the UW QSE Group our present biomedical focus is simply getting biological speciments into our prototype quantum microscope. This recapitulates the early history of electron microscopy, in which specimen preparation was the biggest early hurdle.
Note added: For all you engineers, there are ~10^14 atoms in an ordinary human cell, compared to ~5x10^11 stars in the Milky Way. So each cell in the human body is made, quite literally, of a galaxy of atoms. And by a remarkable numerical coincidence, the number of cells in the human body is about the same as the number of atoms in a cell. Thus every human being can invoke Walt Whitman in saying "I am large, I contain multitudes." Exploring this biological galaxy-of-galaxies is the 21st Century's new frontier of biology and medicine.
Many previous sensing technologies have trod this path (e.g., radio, radar, strain gauges, thermometers, x-ray tomography, synthetic aperture imaging, fiber-optic waveguides, and the Global Positioning System (GPS), to name a few), and all of these sensing technologies, as they emerged, have exerted profound effects on human society.
The good news is, for each of the above technologies the fundamental physical limits to sensitivity were eventually approached quite closely. The sobering news is that charting these sensitivity limits in theory, first in theory and then in practice, has typically required the efforts of an entire generation of physicists.
Many of the most spectacular discoveries in fundamental physics have been stimulated by the struggle to improve sensor technologies. For example, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background was the direct result of Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson's investigation of noise in satellite communication systems.
Less widely appreciated, yet equally important to physics progress, has been the stimulus that sensor development gives to theory; an example is the development by Julian Schwinger of theoretical tools for radar engineering. Learning to "think of nuclear physics in the language of electrical engineering" led Schwinger to create many of the central concepts of modern quantum field theory.
For the physics community, quantum microscopy offers a new opportunity to explore these experimental and theoretical frontiers. In experimental physics there is the open-ended nanoscale physics frontier of fabricating "smaller, sharper, colder, cleaner" cantilevers, and of sensing their excitation with quantum-limited sensitivity.
For theoretical physicists there is the frontier of spin observation physics, in which dynamical effects associated with quantum observation processes are comparable in magnitude to Hamiltonian quantum dynamics; this rapidly emerging physics discipline encompasses both quantum biomicroscopy (at its simplest level) and quantum computing (at a more advanced level).
IBM's breakthrough single-spin experiment has opened new doors to this exciting new physics frontier.The NIH asked for five-page Nanomedicine Concept Development Memos:The NIH Nanomedicine VisionThis Initiative will exploit and build upon other research in nanotechnology, and apply it to studies of molecular systems in living cells. ...
What do we need to learn in order to engineer molecular-sized components? What types of measurements are lacking but, if made, could propel this effort forward? ...
[This program will] develop new tools and knowledge that can be generalized and therefore transcend any individual model pathway, molecular assembly, cell type, or disease.
Our UW Concept Memo is now available on-line; we welcome comments and contacts with prospective partners.The Concept Development Memo will broadly outline the applicant's vision for the content and structure for a nanomedicine center.
Between now and February 15, 2005, our UW QSE Group will be making the case, not only for the NIH to invest in quantum biomicroscopy, but for other initiatives (from the DoD, the NSF, and from private industry) to coordinate with the NIH initiative.
Because of this tight interdisciplinary linkage, it is reasonable to foresee that quantum microscopy will eventually evolve into a single consilient discipline, in which biology, medicine, physics, and engineering are conjoined (a trait that quantum microscopy will share with many other disciplines).