Light has been confined to volumes smaller than the size of a single atom for the first time. The feat, which seemed completely impossible even just a few years ago, has been achieved by researchers in the UK and Spain. They say that the "picocavity" that confines the light can be thought of as the world's smallest magnifying glass. It could be used to study how light and matter interact at tiny scales and even to observe individual chemical bonds forming and breaking between atoms. The technique could also be used to make new optomechanical data-storage devices in which information can be written and read by light and stored in the form of molecular vibrations.
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