The Theory of SNOM: A Novel Approach
Abstract
In this paper we consider the application of electromagnetic theory to the analysis of the Scanning Near-field Optical Microscope (SNOM) in order to predict experimentally observable quantities such as the transmission or reflection coefficients for a particular tip-surface configuration. In particular we present the first application of a transfer matrix based calculation to this challenging problem by using an adaptive co-ordinate transformation to accurately model the shape of the SNOM tip. We also investigate the possibility of increasing the transmitted light through the SNOM tip by introducing a metal wire into the centre of the tip. This converts the tip into a co-axial cable. We show that, in principle, this can dramatically improve the transmission characteristics without having a detrimental effect on the resolution.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9707025,
title = {The Theory of SNOM: A Novel Approach},
author = {A. J. Ward and J. B. Pendry},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9707025},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
19 pages, 11 figures. To be published in the Journal of Modern Optics