Axial phase measurements of light interacting with microstructures

We present an experimental method to study field structures of highly confined light after interaction with microstructures. A high-resolution interference microscope (HRIM) allows us to measure the three-dimensional (3D) amplitude and phase distributions of light emerging from the sample. While the amplitude fields represent conventional pictures of light confinements like a hotspot, the phase fields exhibit peculiar behaviors, which are of significant interest. Longitudinal-differential interferometry can directly visualize and quantify phase deviations in 3D space with respect to a plane wave of the same frequency serving as a reference. The phase fields near the confinement exhibits particular phase features, e.g., axial phase anomaly and superluminal phase velocity. As example of the light interaction with microstructures, two specific optical phenomena have been investigated here: Gouy phase anomaly in the photonic nanojet and superluminal phase propagation of the spot of Arago. For the first time, we could experimentally demonstrate high-resolution axial phase measurements of such phenomena generated by microstructures of wavelengthscale size and at visible light with 642-nm wavelength.