aSNOM - Crossed Polarized

For working with nano-plasmonic structures, we prefer an apertureless SNOM scheme that employs a crossed polarization scheme: incident light is s-polarized, scattered light p-polarized. We have perfected this technique such that virtually no background signal enters the detector. Interference effects and/or coupling between sample and probe are eliminated to first order as we could show, e.g. in Nano Lett. (2008) 8, 3155-3159. Any signal we do record can be directly related to the normal E-field component of the plasmonic sample mode that was excited.

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