Imaging of optical disc using reflection-mode scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy

Inspection of commercial optical devices for data storage using a three Gaussian beam microscope interferometer

Recently, an interferometric profilometer based on the heterodyning of three Gaussian beams has been reported. This microscope interferometer, called a three Gaussian beam interferometer, has been used to profile high quality optical surfaces that exhibit constant reflectivity with high vertical resolution and lateral resolution near lambda. We report the use of this interferometer to measure the profiles of two commercially available optical surfaces for data storage, namely, the compact disk (CD-R) and the digital versatile disk (DVD-R). We include experimental results from a one-dimensional radial scan of these devices without data marks. The measurements are taken by placing the devices with the polycarbonate surface facing the probe beam of the interferometer. This microscope interferometer is unique when compared with other optical measuring instruments because it uses narrowband detection, filters out undesirable noisy signals, and because the amplitude of the output voltage signal is basically proportional to the local vertical height of the surface under test, thus detecting with high sensitivity. We show that the resulting profiles, measured with this interferometer across the polycarbonate layer, provide valuable information about the track profiles, making this interferometer a suitable tool for quality control of surface storage devices.

Optimizing the near field around silver tips

Owing to their promise of obtaining optical as well as topographic information in nanometer scale, apertureless near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) and apertureless near-field scanning optical spectroscopy have drawn much attention recently. However, NSOM is still not a mature technique. A proper understanding of and the ability to tune the near field around the tip end is critically important in NSOM instrumentation and in NSOM image interpretation. On the basis of reflection geometry, we systematically studied the effects of a number of parameters pertinent in the application of apertureless NSOM, e.g., polarization, incident angle, wavelength of the incident laser, tip material, and tip length, by using the generalized field propagator technique. Our results show that all the above parameters have a significant influence on near-field enhancement and that care must be taken in the design of the experiment in order to maximize the near field. In addition to apertureless NSOM and spectroscopy, apertureless near-field lithography can benefit from these simulation results.

Probe design optimization for a high-resolution scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscope

The scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM) has a probe with a sharp tip for use in high resolution imaging. As sharp a tip as possible is generally considered ideal for the observations, but actually, a sharp tip does not always provide a high resolution SNOM image. We numerically examined the scattering property of the SNOM probe by the three dimensional finite difference time domain

METHOD

In this paper, we show the criterion for the ideal scattering probe which satisfies the simple relation between radius and taper angle of the tip.