The theory of SNOM: A novel approach

In this paper we consider the application of electromagnetic theory to the analysis of the Scanning Near-field Optical Microscope (SNOM) in order to predict experimentally observable quantities such as the transmission or reflection coefficients for a particular tip-surface configuration. In particular we present the first application of a transfer matrix based calculation to this challenging problem by using an adaptive coordinate transformation to accurately model the shape of the SNOM tip. We also investigate the possibility of increasing the transmitted light through the SNOM tip by introducing a metal wire into the centre of the tip. This converts the tip into a coaxial cable. We show that, in principle, this can dramatically improve the transmission characteristics without having a detrimental effect on the resolution.

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