STOCKHOLM — Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner and German scientist Stefan Hell won the Nobel Prize in chemistry today for developing new methods that let microscopes see finer details than they could before.

The three scientists were cited for “the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy,” which the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said had bypassed the maximum resolution of traditional optical microscopes.

“Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension,” the academy said.

Betzig, 54, works at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Va. Hell, 51, is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany. Moerner, 61, is a professor at Stanford University.

By The Associated Press