Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Infrared scanning near-field optical microscopy (IR-SNOM) is an extremely powerful analytical instrument since it combines IR spectroscopy's high chemical specificity with SNOM's high spatial resolution. In order to do this in the infrared, specialty chalcogenide glass fibers were fabricated and their ends tapered to generate SNOM probes. The fiber tips were installed in a modified near-field microscope and both inorganic and biological samples illuminated with the tunable output from a free-electron laser located at Vanderbilt University. Both topographical and IR spectral images were simultaneously recorded with a resolution of similar to 50 and similar to 100 nm, respectively. Unique spectroscopic features were identified in all samples, with spectral images exhibiting resolutions of up to lambda/60, or at least 30 times better than the diffraction limited lens-based microscopes. We believe that IR-SNOM can provide a very powerful insight into some of the most important biomedical research topics.
Philip Johannes Walter Moll, Matthias Carsten Putzke, Andrew Scott Hunter
Aleksandra Radenovic, Wayne Yang Wen Wei, Khalid Ashraf Mohie Ibrahim, Helena Miljkovic, Akhil Sai Naidu