Near-field microscopy has been developed to characterize optical properties of materials below the diffraction limit. It consists of scanning a probe, which can be of atomic dimensions, a few nanometers above a material surface, and detecting electromagnetic interaction. The resulting near-field optical images are conventionally analyzed by means of Fourier based methods although these data are...

Constant-height scanning is demonstrated to improve near-field microscopy by eliminating artifacts connected with topography scanning, hence, to image the inherent electromagnetic contrast. Microwaves are chosen for this study because the long wavelength eliminates coherence artifacts, owing to a scale separation of wave and image frequencies. Measured amplitude and phase images of conductive f...

The free boundary of smectic A (SmA), nematic and isotropic liquid phases were studied using a polarized optical microscope, an interferometric surface structure analyzer (ISSA), an atomic force microscope (AFM) and a scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM). Images of the SmA phase free surface obtained by the polarized microscope and ISSA are in good correlation and show a well-known foc...

Wide-field fluorescence microscopy is a commonly used imaging technique by researchers and clinicians. A standard wide-field microscope has no optical sectioning capabilities and this limits its use in imaging thick biological samples. Although standard wide-field fluorescence microscopy with deconvolution techniques can improve image quality [1], it does not provide true optical sectioning, du...

The optical transmission and reflection in between two metalized optical fiber tips is studied in the optical near-field and far-field domains. In addition to aluminum-coated tips for near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM), specifically developed gold-coated fiber tips cut by focused ion beam are investigated. Transverse transmission maps of subwavelength width clearly indicate optical n...

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...