Metallic samples investigated by using a scattering near field optical microscope

Scanning near-field microscopy can overcome diffraction limitation by exploiting the evanescent near fields existing close to any illuminated object. For investigations we used a scattering-type near-field optical microscope (s-SNOM). As the main problem of this kind of microscopy is connected with near field detection we focused on the metallic samples investigations based on the pseudoheterodyne detection. The influence of the oscillating mirror amplitude on the contrast image was studied. Lately the s-SNOM was successfully used for different investigations on the metallic nanoparticles.