Stockholm, Oct 8 (IANS): This year's Nobel Prize for chemistry has been jointly awarded to Eric Betzig, Stefan W. Hell and William E. Moerner, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences made the announcement Wednesday.

The prestigious prize will be awarded to Betzig of Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia, US, Hell of Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, and German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg and Moerner of Stanford University in California, US, for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.

In 1873, the microscopist Ernst Abbe stipulated a physical limit for the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopy: it could never become better than 0.2 micrometres.

Betzig, Hell and Moerner have been awarded the 2014 chemistry Nobel for having bypassed this limit, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its statement.

Due to their achievements, the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld.