Abstract

Tapered optical fibers, single mode fiber with a tapered region diameter of hundreds of nanometers, which we call optical nanofiber, are attracting attention. At the tapered region, light propagates along the fiber with very strong evanescent field outside the sub-micron glass core. The large evanescent field enables highly efficient coupling of single light emitters to an optical nanofiber [1,2]. The existence of a scatter inside the strong evanescent field can also detected as the degradation of optical transmittance [3]. Here, we demonstrate non-contact detection of nanoscale structures using optical nanofiber with the vertical resolution of less than 10 nm and the lateral resolution of 500 nm, and the one-dimensional imaging of the nanostructures.

© 2017 IEEE