Near-field optical microscopy nanoarray

摘要

Multiplexing near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) by the use of a nanoarray with parallel imaging is studied. The fabrication, characterization, and utilization of nanoarrays with (approximately) 100 nm diameter apertures spaced 500 nm center-to-center is presented. Extremely uniform nanoarrays with (approximately) 10(sup 8) apertures were fabricated by electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching. The nanoarrays were characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). In this paper we utilize these nanoarrays in a laser-illuminated microscope with parallel detection on a charge- coupled device (CCD). Detection of B-phycoerythrin (B-PE) molecules using near-field illumination is presented. In principle, our system can be used to obtain high lateral resolution NSOM images over a wide-field of view (e.g. 50-100 (mu)m) within seconds.