PRACTICAL GUIDE TO APERTURELESS OPTICAL SCANNING MICROSCOPY

It is always challenging to break the rules, especially in such well established discipline as the optics is. One superstition, saying that optical resolution is limited by optical wavelength and by optics quality, has fallen two decades ago. In early 90's Wickramasinghe et al. have realized [1,2] that incident optical field can be concentrated by sharp protrusions and that tip curvature (not a light wavelength) will determine then actual optical resolution. Originally applied for elastic scattering signal with demonstration of sub-nanometer lateral resolution, this fruitful idea was implemented later in JILA (Boulder, Colorado, USA) in emission studies of single quantum dots and molecules. In 2004, 10-20 times emission enhancement and 20-30 nm spatial optical resolution have been demonstrated on single fluorophores. With a detail description of the project provided in this brochure you can also achieve such unprecedent parameters in your optical lab.