Fabrication of Silicon Microprobes for Optical Near-Field Applications

Based upon the authors' own research and experiments, this book develops several technological approaches to using silicon micromachining techniques for fabricating microprobes without the drawbacks of conventional optical fiber probes. The authors have developed a simple, effective method for batch-process production of silicon cantilevered probes with apertures as small as 20 nanometers. They have investigated in detail the probes' optical performance characteristics and show how silicon probes overcome the limitations of the optical fiber probes in terms of production throughput, optical throughput, reproducibility, simplicity of instrumentation, and mechanical performance.

Phan Ngoc Minh, Ono Takahito, Esashi Masayoshi

Introduction. Introduction of Near-Field Optics. Introduction of Silicon Micromachining Technology. Fabrication of Silicon Microprobes for Optical Near-Field Applications. Evaluation of the Microfabricated Optical Near-Field Probes. Novel Probes for Locally Enhancing of Near-Field Light and Other Applications. Using Finite Difference Time Domain Method. Sub-Wavelength Optical Imaging with the Fabricated Probes. Optical Near-Field Lithography . Optical Near-Field Recording with the Fabricated Aperture Array. Future Aspect and Conclusions.