Related papers: Resolving proximal nanometer objects below the dif…
Interference with atomic and molecular matter waves is a rich branch of atomic physics and quantum optics. It started with atom diffraction from crystal surfaces and the separated oscillatory fields technique used in atomic clocks. Atom…
A near-field optical detection method and its theoretical model are developed, which follow from an algebra-based conclusion: in the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) region, the extinction coefficient of a metal nanosphere is the…
Tip enhanced IR spectra and imaging have been widely used in cutting-edge studies for the in-depth understanding of the composition, structure and function of interfaces at the nanoscale. However, molecular monolayer sensitivity has only…
Optical microscopy has so far been restricted to superficial layers, leaving many important biological questions unanswered. Random scattering causes the ballistic focus, which is conventionally used for image formation, to decay…
Thick biological tissues give rise to not only the scattering of incoming light waves, but also aberrations of the remaining unscattered waves. Due to the inability of existing optical imaging methodologies to overcome both of these…
Quantitative polarisation-resolved optical extinction microscopy of individual plasmonic nanoparticles has recently been introduced as a powerful tool to characterise the nanoparticle's morphology with a precision comparable to electron…
We present a method to measure the vector-field light scattering of individual microscopic objects. The polarization-dependent optical field images are measured with quantitative phase imaging at the sample plane, and then numerically…
The precise optical, label-free, measurement of mass at the nanoscale has been significantly advanced by techniques based on interferometric scattering, such as mass photometry (MP). These methods exploit the interference between a…
X-ray microscopy has been an indispensable tool to image nanoscale properties for materials research. One of its recent advances is to extend microscopic studies to the time domain for visualizing the dynamics of nanoscale phenomena.…
We show that high-resolution laser spectroscopy can probe surface interactions of gas confined in nano-cavities of porous materials. We report on strong line broadening and unfamiliar lineshapes due to tight confinement, as well as signal…
Optical detection of nanoscale objects without relying on fluorescence is a current challenge due to their extremely weak interaction with light. Resonator-enhanced absorption microscopy is a novel tool to heavily boost the light-matter…
Metasurfaces based on gap surface-plasmon resonators allow one to arbitrarily control the phase, amplitude and polarization of reflected light with high efficiency. However, the performance of densely-packed metasurfaces is reduced, often…
Our visual perception of our surroundings is ultimately limited by the diffraction limit, which stipulates that optical information smaller than roughly half the illumination wavelength is not retrievable. Over the past decades, many…
High-numerical-aperture (NA) oblique plane microscopy enables noninvasive fluorescence imaging of subcellular dynamics without requiring radical sample modification. However, performance degrades at depth in multicellular specimens as…
Diffraction of light at lateral inhomogenities is a central process in the near-field studies of nanoscale phenomena, especially the propagation of surface waves. Theoretical description of this process is extremely challenging due to…
Scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) allows for nanoscale resolved Infrared (IR) and Terahertz (THz) imaging, and thus has manifold applications ranging from materials to biosciences. However, a quantitatively…
In this thesis, we propose to tackle this important issue by designing and realizing a novel nano-optical device based on the use of a photonic crystal (PC) structure to generate an efficient coupling between the external source and a NA.…
Interferometry can measure the shape or the material density of a system that could not be measured otherwise by recording the difference between the phase change of a signal and a reference phase. This difference is always between $-\pi$…
In both light optics and electron optics, the amplitude of a wave scattered by an object is an observable that is usually recorded in the form of an intensity distribution in a real space image or a diffraction image. In contrast, retrieval…
Advanced geometrical nanometrology is critical for process control in semiconductor manufacturing, supporting applications in, e.g., photonic integrated circuits, nanoelectronics, and emerging quantum and optoelectronic technologies.…