Stefan Walter Hell

Happy birthday to physicist Stefan Walter Hell (born 23 December 1962). Hell is a Romanian-born German physicist and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”, together with Eric Betzig and William Moerner. With the invention and subsequent development of Stimulated Emission Depletion microscopy and related microscopy methods, Hell was able to show that one can substantially improve the resolving power of the fluorescence microscope, previously limited to half the wavelength of the employed light (> 200 nanometers). Hell was the first to demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, how one can decouple the resolution of the fluorescence microscope from diffraction and increase it to a fraction of the wavelength of light (to the nanometer scale). Ever since the work of Ernst Karl Abbe in 1873, this feat was not thought possible.

Date in History: 23 December 1962