The origin of Raman spectroscopy dates back to the early 20th century. Theoretical predictions1 postulated that photons should inelastically scatter from molecules in analogy to the Compton scattering of X-rays. In 1928, Raman and Krishnan2 provided the first experimental evidence for such scattering events. Targeting a solution of chloroform with a beam of spectrally filtered sunlight, they de...

The ability of using scattering-type near-field scanning optical microscopy (s-NSOM) to characterize amplitude and phase of optical near fields was investigated. We employ numerical simulations to compute signals scattered by the tip, using a bowtie nano-aperture as the example, and compare with the data obtained from s-NSOM measurements. Through demodulation of higher order harmonic signals, w...