Shedding light on NSOM.

I took patience and hard work. Now, finally, researchers are seeing some sunshine break through what was once a cloudy beginning for near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM). Paul Barbara of the University of Texas–Austin (UT– Austin) is among a group of analytical chemists who have a deep respect for this tool and see it as a technique ripe with potential, ranging from chemistry to physics. NSOM, or SNOM, is steadily finding an important place in analytical chemistry, and company representatives are enthusiastic about its future in nanotechnology. Experts describe it as a bridge between atomic force microscopy (AFM) and optical microscopy. “The great thing about NSOM is that it gives you topographic information online with optics. This is something people could never do in the past,” says Aaron Lewis of Nanonics, who in the mid-1980s led a group of researchers at Cornell University that published the first papers on the applications of NSOM. Lewis still recalls a grant administrator at British Petroleum who in 1982 wrote him a letter that all but dismissed NSOM when the technique was still in its infancy. “The research you describe certainly meets the ‘fundamental’ criterion,” wrote the administrator, “but I have had some difficulty in imagining an outcome of sufficient magnitude to justify an involvement.” With that, the administrator told Lewis’s group that the research didn’t qualify for funding. “Many people in those days were not even taught that near-field optics could, in fact, be anything,” recalls Lewis, who now teaches applied physics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Now with all this nanotechnology revolution, people are looking deeper and deeper into how you look at light, how you concentrate light, how you analyze light, [and] how you manipulate light in very small domains.” Researchers and company representatives recall that during the early to mid-1990s, when NSOM instruments started appearing in laboratories, the technique presented many challenges Shedding light on NSOM