Other Imaging and Applications

Abstract

In this chapter, the following five topics are selected within various applications using near field optics. First, we describe the principle and equipment of the birefringent-contrast near-field optical microscope and observations of samples in Sect. 10.1 The observation of birefringent distribution is important in view of the evaluation of liquid crystal or polymer materials by molecular orientation. In Sect. 10.2, the development of a simple low-temperature near-field optical microscope is explained. Low-temperature near-field optical microscopes are necessary for semiconductor spectral analysis, e.g., quantum dot, because conventional microscopes are difficult to handle and change samples. In Sect. 10.3, a near-field microscope system is developed that can detect tunneling light emission from the probe tip of the scanning tunneling microscope. The feature of this microscope is observing the optical emission characteristic distribution of a sample with lateral resolution on the nanometer scale. In Sect. 10.4, a new method for detecting an evanecent wave is proposed that uses an electron beam as a probe; it has succeeded in observing an evanescent wave in the infrared region experimentally. In Sect. 10.5, we describe a method and features for driving Mie particles by an evanescent photon force formed in an optical channeled wave-guide. The driving performance of a multimode waveguide has been especially clarified.