In the search for a suitable replacement, a team from the Swinburne University of Technology has developed a graphene microlens one billionth of a meter thick that can take sharper images of objects the size of a single bacterium and opens the door to improved mobile phones, nanosatellites, and computers.

One of the key obstacles in advances in optical microscopes is the lens or, more precisely, the diffraction limit, which is the theoretical limit of the resolution of a particular lens. There have been a number of attempts at overcoming the diffraction limit by using such techniques as interferometry, holography, lasers, and electrons, and although scientists have enjoyed some success, it has only been at great cost and complexity.

Another approach has been to explore the use of ultrathin flat lenses that are etched with concentric circles and act like tiny Fresnel lenses. According to the Swinburne team, this has also had some success, but only by crafting the lenses out of gold and other metals that don't lend themselves to mass production.