In this article results of a comparison of two NSOM probe characterization methods are presented. Scanning electron microscopy analysis combined with electromagnetic field modeling using the finite difference in time domain method are compared with measured far-field radiation diagrams of NSOM probes. It is shown that measurement of far-field radiation diagrams can be an efficient tool for dail...

We have implemented simultaneous picosecond pulsed two- and three-photon excitation of near-UV and visible absorbing fluorophores in a scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM). The 1064-nm emission from a pulsed Nd:YVO4 laser was used to excite the visible mitochondrial specific dye MitoTracker Orange CM-H2TMRos or a Cy3-labeled antibody by two-photon excitation, and the UV absorbing DNA d...

We have developed an instrument for optically measuring carrier dynamics in thin-film materials with approximately 150 nm lateral resolution, approximately 250 fs temporal resolution and high sensitivity. This is accomplished by combining an ultrafast pump-probe laser spectroscopic technique with a near-field scanning optical microscope. A diffraction-limited pump and near-field probe configura...

We report on the design, characterization, and performance of a near-field scanning thermal microscope capable to detect thermal heat currents mediated by evanescent thermal electromagnetic fields close to the surface of a sample. The instrument operates in ultrahigh vacuum and retains its scanning tunneling microscope functionality, so that its miniature, micropipette-based thermocouple sensor...

This paper proposes a novel wavelet denoising method, which exploits the statistics of individual scans acquired in the course of a coaveraging process. The proposed method consists of shrinking the wavelet coefficients of the noisy signal by a factor that minimizes the expected square error with respect to the true signal. Since the true signal is not known, a sub-optimal estimate of the shrin...