Scanning Near-field Optical Microscopy Nanonics Imaging MV 4000

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Dalibor Šulc

SNOM is a microscopic tool, which breaks the far-field light resolution limit by mapping the near-field light (evanescent waves) distribution of nanostructures. In order to achieve this, there is a very sharp optical probe (detectors/illu­minators), which has an aperture of tens of nanometers. This scans the sample surface at a distance much smaller than the wavelengths of the light interacting with it. The optical resolution and structure size resolution is limited by the probe size, not by the wavelength of the incidental light (resolution ~100 nm).
This technique provides for the capabilities of the basic experimental setup – illumination by a SNOM probe set to collect interacting light in reflection or transmission; to illuminate a sample in transmission or reflection and collection the interacting light via a SNOM probe.