51¶¯Âþ

A BEAM of light has been squeezed through a tinier hole than anyone thought possible. Normally light gets scattered in all directions by diffraction if you try to send it through a gap narrower than the wavelength of the light. But Thomas Ebbesen of Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg and his team got around this by etching a corrugated pattern around both sides of a hole in a metal plate. Light waves passing through the hole, which was less than half a wavelength across, interfere with the ones bouncing off the ridges, focusing the light into a beam that spreads only 3 degrees from the beam’s axis, they report in a future issue of Science.