External-reflection near-field optical microscope with cross-polarized detection

• DOI: 10.1364/ao.33.000876
• Publication Date: 2009-03-20T12:23:27Z
• Authors: S. I. Bozhevolnyi; M. Xiao; O. Keller
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; Scanning Near-field Optical Microscopy; 01 natural sciences

An external-reflection scanning near-field optical microscope with the detected light polarized perpendicular to the polarization of the light coupled into the fiber is presented. When various metallic gratings are scanned, it is shown that the lateral and the depth resolutions of this microscope are better than 100 and 10 nm, respectively.