Development of high throughput polarization maintaining NSOM probes

High throughput, polarization maintaining probes for Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopy (NSOM) were fabricated by chemical etching. An aperture was formed with Focused Ion Beam after coating the tips with 300 nm of aluminum. Tips showed a typical far field polarization extinction ratio of 100 to 1. The throughput of the tips depends on the polarization of the incident light because of the boundary conditions imposed by elliptical aperture.; We show NSOM images obtained with these probes on gold dots on a GaAs substrate. NSOM images show a contrast inversion on the gold dots compared to the far-field imaging. We were not able to determine the spatial resolution of the probes since the topographic effects dominate the optical response. Interference effects and variation of the light intensity in close proximity to the sample are observed and studied.