Applications of near field optical microscopy: Fluorescence in situ hybridisation, Langmuir-Blodgett films and integrated optical waveguides

Scanning Near-field Optical Microscopy (SNOM), based on metal coated adiabatically tapered fibres, combined with shear force feedback and operated in illumination mode, has proven to be the most powerful SNOM arrangement, because of its true localisation of the optical interaction, its true optical contrast (fluorescence, polarisation, etc.) and its sensitivity down to the single molecular level. We present the first application of SNOM to (i) Fluorescence In Situ Hybridisation (FISH) of human metaphase chromosomes, where the localised fluorescence allows to identify specific DNA sequences in addition to the topographic force image, and (ii) Langmuir-Blodgett mono-layers, where the orientation of the polymer backbone and the degree of polymerisation is visualised in the near-field polarised fluorescence simultaneously with the topography in the force signal.

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