There has been an immense drive in modern microscopy towards miniaturization and fibre-based technology. This has been necessitated by the need to access hostile or difficult environments in situ and in vivo. Strategies to date have included the use of specialist fibres and miniaturized scanning systems accompanied by ingenious microfabricated lenses. Here we present a novel approach for this f...

Near-field photodetection optical microscopy (NPOM) is a fundamentally new approach to near-field optical microscopy. This scanning-probe technique uses a nanometer-scale photodiode detector as a near-field optical probe. We have fabricated probes for NPOM that have optically sensitive areas as small as 100 nm x 100 nm. These new NPOM probes have been employed to image light transmitted through...

microscopy Jin Sun, John C. Schotland, Rainer Hillenbrand, and P. Scott Carney Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA Department of Bioengineering and Graduate Group in Applied Mathematics and Computational Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA Nanooptics Laboratory, CIC nanoGUNE Consolider, 200...

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...