Enlarged near-field optical imaging

Enlarged near-field optical imaging

Background suppression in near-field optical imaging.

In several recent studies, antenna-based optical microscopy has demonstrated its potential to resolve features as small as 10 nm. Most studies are concerned with well-separated features on flat surfaces, and there are only few studies that deal with samples of high feature density or even three-dimensional objects. The reason is that the external laser irradiation of the optical antenna (e.g., ...

Quantitative imaging of the optical near field.

When exposing small particles on a substrate to a light plane wave, the scattered optical near field is spatially modulated and highly complex. We show, for the particular case of dielectric microspheres, that it is possible to image these optical near-field distributions in a quantitative way. By placing a single microsphere on a thin film of the photosensitive phase change material Ge(2)Sb(5)...

Cloaked near-field scanning optical microscope tip for noninvasive near-field imaging.

Near-field imaging is a well-established technique in biomedical measurements, since closer to the detail of interest it is possible to resolve subwavelength details otherwise unresolved by regular lenses. A near-field scanning optical microscope (NSOM) tip may indeed overcome the resolution limits of far-field optics, but its proximity inherently perturbs the measurement. Here, we apply the re...

Imaging Nanoscale Electromagnetic Near-Field Distributions Using Optical Forces

We demonstrate the application of Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) for mapping optical near-fields with nanometer resolution, limited only by the AFM probe geometry. By detecting the optical force between a gold coated AFM probe and its image dipole on a glass substrate, we profile the electric field distributions of tightly focused laser beams with different polarizations. The experimentally reco...