Development of high-throughput, polarization-maintaining, near-field probes.
A novel, chemical-etching technique produces very high throughput, polarization-maintaining probes for near-field, scanning, optical microscopy (NSOM). The process includes coating the tips with aluminum and forming the apertures with a focused ion beam (FIB). The elliptical core fibers used resulted in elliptical apertures for the probes. The throughput of the probes depends on the incident polarization. For polarization parallel to the minor axis, the tip presents an insertion loss of only 20 dB for aperture widths of 55 nm. Probes have a typical polarization extinction of 100 to 1 in the far field. These tips produced NSOM images of gold dots on a GaAs substrate in reflection mode.
Adiga
Vivekananda P
VP
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park 20742, USA.
Kolb
Paul W
PW
Evans
Geoffrey T
GT
Cubillos-Moraga
Max A
MA
Schmadel
Don C
DC
Dyott
Richard
R
Drew
H Dennis
HD