A novel probe structure, which can act as a planar nano-probe slide for near-field microscopy, was
proposed and fabricated. Sub-wavelength apertures on a Si substrate are successfully produced by
means of standard photolithography techniques with prop...
A novel probe structure, which can act as a planar nano-probe slide for near-field microscopy, was
proposed and fabricated. Sub-wavelength apertures on a Si substrate are successfully produced by
means of standard photolithography techniques with properly selected masks. In particular, the
anisotropic etching characteristics of Si substrate and the hardness of the Si3N4 lm are utilized.
Probe-to-probe scanning of the fabricated near-field nano-probe slide shows sub-wavelength confinement
of light and comparable throughput to the conventional optical fiber probe. We also show
that the nano-probe slide can serve as a supporting base and a sub-wavelength aperture to obtain
the near-field photoluminescence spectra of a limited number of CdSe nanocrystals.