We use fluorescent nanospheres as scalar detectors for the electric-field intensity in order to probe the near-field of an optical tip used in aperture-type near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM). Surprisingly, the recorded fluorescence images show two intensity lobes if the sphere diameter is smaller that the aperture diameter, as expected only in the case of vector detectors like singl...

Combining the nanoscopic and macroscopic worlds is a serious challenge common to numerous scientific fields, from physics to biology. In this paper, we demonstrate nanometric resolution over a millimeter range by means of atomic-force microscopy using metrological stage. Nanometric repeatability and millimeter range open up the possibility of probing components and materials combining multiscal...

An object is characterized by its amplitude and phase. However, when acquiring optical data about such an object, using a recording medium such as a camera, phase information is lost. Crystallography experienced a breakthrough in phase retrieval for large molecular entities by Max Perutz's introduction of "heavy atoms" using the method of isomorphous replacement. The availability of scanning pr...

scanning hall probe microscopy (shpm) is a scanning probe microscopy technique developed to observe and image magnetic fields locally. this method is based on application of the hall effect, supplied by a micro hall probe attached to the end of cantilever as a sensor.  shpm provides direct quantitative information on the magnetic state of a material and can also image magnetic induction under a...

Conventional apertureless scanning near-field optical microscopy uses lock-in demodulation techniques to filter higher harmonics from the periodically modulated optical signal. On the one hand, this signal notoriously may contain contaminating mechanical contributions; on the other, it reduces the available data to one number per pixel. Realizing that the vertically oscillating near-field probe...

We report the observation of propagating modes of visible and near infrared light in nanoscale coaxial (metal-dielectric-metal) structures, using near-field scanning optical microscopy. Together with numerical calculations, we show that the propagated modes have different nature depending on the excitation wavelength, i.e., plasmonic TE11 and TE21 modes in the near infrared and photonic TE31, T...

Near field Scanning Optical Microscopy using heterodyne optical feedback on Erdoped DFB fiber laser at =1.55μm is investigated for optical characterizations of plasmonic waveguides. The experimental results are compared with FDTD numerical models. OCIS : 180.4243 (Near field microscopy) 250.5403 (Plasmonics) 310.2790 (Guided waves) Laser Feedback Interferometry (LFI) has been already investiga...

We report methods of near-field infrared microscopy with transient optically induced probes. The first technique - a transient aperture (TA) - uses photoinduced reflectivity in semiconductors to generate a relatively large transient mirror (TM) with a small aperture at its centre. We report the optical properties of the TM and TA and experiments performed on near-field imaging with the TA. The ...

Scattering near-field scanning optical microscopy (s-NSOM) has been developed to characterize optical near field with spatial resolution on the order of 10 nm. In this work we report investigation of the interferometric patterns commonly occurred in s-NSOM measurements. To reveal the origin of such interference patterns, a simple nanoslit is used. Comparing the measured result with a simplified...