Nanoscopic studies investigated by hybrid SNOM/STM

Abstract In order to improve the spatial resolution in scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM), we designed a hybrid system of illumination mode SNOM integrated with scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) by introducing a metal-coated optical fiber tip with a nanometer-scale aperture. The aperture is also covered with a thin metal layer, thus the top of the aperture acts as an STM tip. We employed several materials to show the capability of our hybrid SNOM/STM system as a tool to investigate nanoscopic phenomena. We present a simultaneous SNOM/STM imaging of Au(111), where the SNOM image has a lateral resolution of the order of nanometers, quite comparable to that of the STM image. An azobenzene dye molecule embedded in liquid crystalline cyanobiphenyl molecules on MoS2 was also investigated.

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