A visit to the optometrist often involves optical coherence tomography. This imaging process uses infrared radiation to penetrate the layers of the retina and examine it more closely in three dimensions without having to touch the eye at all. This allows eye specialists to diagnose diseases such as glaucoma without any physical intervention. However, this method would have even greater potential for science if a shorter radiation wavelength were used, thus allowing a higher resolution of the image. Physicists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany) have now achieved just that and they have reported their research findings in the latest issue of the specialist journal Optica.