Abstract

We describe a scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOW) based on fiber-optical techniques¹ combined with a spectrometer. In many approaches, only the illumination or the detection of the light is made in the near- field.^2-1 However, in our microscope, the fiber tip attached to a bidirectional fiber coupler is used simultaneously as a subwavelength-size light source and read-out aperture. In the reflection mode, we do not find speckle patterns superimposed on the image as usually appear in the optical tunneling mode.⁴ Reflection SNOM images are, therefore, easier to interpret and can give a measure of the sample topography.

© 1993 Optical Society of America