Abstract
We describe a technique that allows the improvement of the resolution of optical microscopes for nanofiber measurements beyond the diffraction limit. It can be readily implemented on any microscope. We demonstrated it by measuring tapered fibers radii from 0.4 to 4 µm with a resolution below the diffraction limit, from a few nanometers up to 50 nm in the worst case, depending on the radii. This technique is a non-contact measurement with the microscope objective placed a few centimeters from the nanofiber. We acquire the experimental diffraction pattern by scanning the object plane of the microscope system, upstream and downstream the nanofiber. We compare this experimental diffraction pattern to a bank of all the simulated patterns for all the radii. The radius of the simulated diffraction pattern that best matches to the experimental one is the sought radius.
Highlights
Optical micro and nanofibers received considerable interest for studying optical nonlinear interactions or for conceiving optical sensors [1,2]
The strong evanescent optical field in the nanofibers section makes the light propagation very sensitive to the external environment. These features serve as the basis of a full variety of optical sensors [11,12]. They have been used for stimulated Raman scattering in the evanescent field [13,14], in four wave mixing [10,15,16], for correlated photon sources [17], as well as in quantum optics [18,19] and optomechanics [20]
We compute the Euclidean distances between the shifted versions of this experimental diffraction pattern and the set of simulated ones
Summary
Optical micro and nanofibers received considerable interest for studying optical nonlinear interactions or for conceiving optical sensors [1,2] These nanofibers can be obtained via flame-brushing techniques [3,4], typically from a telecom fiber whose diameter is 125 μm. The resulting object is a nanofiber with an extremely large aspect ratio: its diameter can be below one micrometer while its length can exceed several centimeters This nanofiber is attached by two tapered transition sections to the original standard fiber. The strong evanescent optical field in the nanofibers section makes the light propagation very sensitive to the external environment These features serve as the basis of a full variety of optical sensors [11,12]. They have been used for stimulated Raman scattering in the evanescent field [13,14], in four wave mixing [10,15,16], for correlated photon sources [17], as well as in quantum optics [18,19] and optomechanics [20]
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