Surface Plasmon mediated near-field imaging and optical addressing in nanoscience

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in plasmonics, focusing on surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) imaging and optical addressing using near-field microscopy techniques like PSTM and NSOM, highlighting their applications in nanoscience.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent near-field microscopy methods for imaging and manipulating SPPs and nano-objects, comparing their effectiveness with far-field techniques.

Findings

NSOM can actively address nano-objects like quantum dots remotely.

PSTM effectively images SPP propagation in waveguides.

Near-field microscopy offers advantages over far-field methods in plasmonic studies.

Abstract

We present an overview of recent progress in plasmonics. We focus our study on the observation and excitation of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) with optical near-field microscopy. We discuss in particular recent applications of photon scanning tunnelling microscope (PSTM) for imaging of SPP propagating in metal and dielectric wave guides. We show how near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) can be used to optically and actively address remotely nano-objects such as quantum dots. Additionally we compare results obtained with near-field microscopy to those obtained with other optical far-field methods of analysis such as leakage radiation microscopy (LRM).