Scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM)

The advent of Scanning Near-field Optical Microscopy (SNOM) has augmented at a microscopic level the usefulness of optical spectroscopy and two-dimensional imaging of chemical constituents makes this a very attractive and powerful new approach. In this paper we will review various configurations of the SNOM technique and some representative results obtained in material science and on biological samples by means of shear-force, reflectivity and fluorescence, with a lateral resolution well below the diffraction limit. © 2008 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.