very smooth thin films of iridium have been deposited on super polished fused silica (sio2) substrates using dc magnetron sputtering in argon plasma. the influence of deposition process parameters on film micro roughness has been investigated. in addition, film optical constants have been determined using variable angle spectroscopic ellipsometery, over the spectra range from vacuum ultraviolet...

Structural, electrical and optical properties of indium tin oxide or ITO (In2O3:SnO2) thin films on different substrates are investigated. A 100-nm-thick pre-deposited zinc oxide (ZnO) buffer layer is utilized to simultaneously improve the electrical and optical properties of ITO films. High purity ZnO and ITO layers are deposited with a radio frequency sputtering in argon ambient with plasma p...

Refinements in design have simplified confocal microscopy to the extent that it has become a standard research tool in cell biology. However, as confocal microscopes have become more powerful, they have also become more demanding of their optical components. In fact, optical aberrations that cause subtle defects in image quality in wide-field microscopy can have devastating effects in confocal ...

Holography has paved the way for phase imaging in a variety of wide-field techniques, including electron, X-ray and optical microscopy. In scanning optical microscopy, however, the serial fashion of image acquisition seems to challenge a direct implementation of traditional holography. Here we introduce synthetic optical holography (SOH) for quantitative phase-resolved imaging in scanning optic...

A technique that combines scanning electrochemical microscopy (SECM) and optical microscopy (OM) was implemented with a new probe tip. The tip for scanning electrochemicaVoptical microscopy (SECM/OM) was constructed by insulating a typical gold-coated near-field scanning optical microscopy tip using electrophoretic anodic paint. Once fabricated, the tip was characterized by steady-state cyclic ...

We have used polarized confocal Raman microspectroscopy and scanning near-field optical microscopy with a resolution of 60 nm to characterize photoinscribed grating structures of azobenzene doped polymer films on a glass support. Polarized Raman microscopy allowed determining the reorientation of the chromophores as a function of the grating phase and penetration depth of the inscribing laser i...

We demonstrate quantitative phase mapping in confocal optical microscopy by applying synthetic optical holography (SOH), a recently introduced method for technically simple and fast phase imaging in scanning optical microscopy. SOH is implemented in a confocal microscope by simply adding a linearly moving reference mirror to the microscope setup, which generates a synthetic reference wave analo...