Grafting fluorescent nanodiamonds onto optical tips

TL;DR

The paper presents an all-optical method for grafting nanodiamonds onto optical tips, enabling precise placement for advanced near-field imaging and potential quantum applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optical technique for attaching and repositioning nanodiamonds on optical tips with nanometer accuracy, enhancing scanning microscopy capabilities.

Findings

Successfully grafted single and multiple nanodiamonds onto optical tips.

Achieved nanometer-scale precision in positioning nanodiamonds.

Enabled stable single-photon emission in scanning microscopy.

Abstract

We recently (Optics Express 17, 19969 (2009)) introduced an all-optical method for grafting onto the apex of an optical tip a single 20 nm nanodiamond with single color-center occupancy and used the resulting single-photon tip in scanning near-field imaging at room temperature, thereby achieving a genuine scanning single-photon microscopy working in ambient conditions. A variant of this method is described that allows for attaching several nanodiamonds onto the tip apex, releasing them all at once and finally recapturing them one by one by the scanning tip. This underlines the flexibility and powerfulness of our method and its variant that could be used in applications where a fixed number of selected optically active nano-objects requires positioning, or repositioning, at well defined locations with nanometer accuracy.