Theory of near-field optics with applications to SNOM and optical binding

Abstract

Near-field optics, whose recent developments were stimulated by analogies with micro-electronics devices, evidence the limitations of the theoretical methods commonly used in the study of electromagnetic waves. Most of these new applications involve mesoscopic systems where retardation, polarization, multiple scattering and evanescent waves are playing a major role. We present an exact computational scheme which accounts for all these aspects. The treatment is based on the perturbation of the Green dyadic of a reference system. Scanning near-field optical microscopy and optical binding exhibit the above near-field features. We solve them using this new Green dyadic technique. The close agreement between our computed results and experimental data demonstrates the efficiency of the method.