For imaging of nanoscale objects, optical microscopy has limited resolution since the objects are often much smaller than the wavelength of light. One can achieve a considerable improvement in resolution with instruments such as the transmission electron microscope and the scanning electron microscope that use electrons with De Broglie wavelength much smaller than that of visible light. To image picoscale and maybe attoscale objects, in principle, we may need a coherent beam of atoms because it may have a smaller De Broglie wavelength than that of electron beam!
In principle this is right, but atoms in BECs in today's laboratories have deBroglie wavelengths of about 100 Angstroms. Reducing DeBroglie wavelengths seems to me to be more practical by increasing energy of probe beam though there are other issues there.
Here is an article about such a microscope.
It doesn't use an atom beam but a BEC cloud.
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v6/n7/full/nnano.2011.80.html
Regards,
Joachim
Thank you Charles and Joachim for your helpful contributions. I found very useful the reference within the link. Best regards,
I do not have access to the article in the link provided by Prof Joachim. Hence I could not read it. However, I doubt if the statement, " Cooling the atoms in the gas to form a Bose–Einstein condensate increases the resolution of the device." given in the abstract of this paper is correct. Decreasing the temperature increase the de Broglie wave length which means decreases the resolution.