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Reading the micrometer can be tricky when you are not used to it. To mitigate any reading error, it is helpful to take a rougher measurement with calipers first to see what dimension you are aiming for.

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The LibreTexts libraries are Powered by NICE CXone Expert and are supported by the Department of Education Open Textbook Pilot Project, the UC Davis Office of the Provost, the UC Davis Library, the California State University Affordable Learning Solutions Program, and Merlot. We also acknowledge previous National Science Foundation support under grant numbers 1246120, 1525057, and 1413739. Legal. Accessibility Statement For more information contact us at info@libretexts.org.

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A micrometer is an essential tool for taking precise measurements. It has a precision of 0.01 mm and if you ever aspire to make something with tight tolerance you will probably need to use it. We will have a look at how to use a traditional analog micrometer and how to read the dimension correctly.

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The authors are grateful to E. Rogers, P. J. S. Smith, N. Papasimakis, I. Kuprov, Y. Shen, B. Ou, E. Aik Chan and C. Rendon Barraza for discussions and S. Varier for preparation of the manuscript. This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council UK (grant nos. EP/M009122/1 and EP/T02643X/1), the Singapore National Research Foundation (grant no. NRF-CRP23-2019-0006), the Singapore Ministry of Education (grant no. MOE2016-T3-1-006) and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) Singapore (grant no. SERC A1685b0005). G.Y. is also supported by the National Innovative Talents Program of China.

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The number of lines on the top of the horizontal zero line tells you the millimeters. We can see 4 lines for this measurement. Meaning our measurement is over 4 mm.

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Light can be focused into a sub-diffraction superoscillatory hotspot of any shape and size beyond the ‘diffraction limit’ by lenses constructed as a gradient, metamaterial or binary intensity and phase masks.

This graduation shows you the tenths and hundreds of a millimeter. It is divided into 50 graduations. There fore each graduation equals 0.01 mm. We will simply have a look at which graduation lines up with the horizontal zero line. For this part, we can see that the number is 29. Because we can not see the half-millimeter line we just add this number to 4.0 mm. Therefore our final dimension is 4.29 mm.

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Present address: Department of Optics and Optical Engineering, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

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Video: In this video, we are looking at a micrometer. This is a device for taking precise measurements. It has a precision of 0,01 mm and is essential in any machine shop. I am quickly showing how it is built and how it works as well as how to take a measurement with it. I hope this is helpful.

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In the video, I am showing how to take the measurement and also talking a little bit about how the micrometer is made. So this could be helpful for understanding this device a little better.

Centre for Disruptive Photonic Technologies, The Photonics Institute, School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

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Optical superoscillations are rapid, subwavelength spatial variations of the intensity and phase of light, occurring in complex electromagnetic fields formed by the interference of several coherent waves. The discovery of superoscillations stimulated a revision of the limits of classical electromagnetism — in particular, the studies of phenomena such as unlimitedly small energy hotspots, phase singularities, energy backflow, anomalously high wavevectors and their intriguing similarities to the evanescent plasmonic fields on metals. In recent years, the understanding of superoscillatory light has led to the development of superoscillatory lensing, imaging and metrology technologies. Dielectric, metallic and metamaterial nanostructured superoscillatory lenses have been introduced that are able to create hotspots smaller than allowed by conventional lenses. Far-field, label-free, non-intrusive deeply subwavelength super-resolution imaging and metrology techniques that exploit high light localization and rapid variation of phase in superoscillatory fields have also been developed, including new approaches based on artificial intelligence. We review the fundamental properties of superoscillatory optical fields and examine emerging technological applications.

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The high sensitivity of scattering of superoscillatory light to the object’s shape features can be used for optical imaging with deeply subwavelength, molecular-level resolution, in which reconstructing the object from the scattering pattern is performed by machine learning.

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Superoscillatory lenses can be used for label-free, far-field, non-invasive imaging with super-resolution that is determined by the size of the superoscillatory hotspot.

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Lines under the horizontal zero line show us the half-millimeters. When you can not see the half-millimeter line it means that your dimension is between 4.0 and 4.5 mm. If we can see the half mm line, it means that the dimension is between 4.5 and 5 mm.

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