NEW OPTICAL NEAR-FIELD DEVELOPMENTS - SOME PERSPECTIVES IN INTERFEROMETRY

This work deals with the interaction of an evanescent standing wave wi th nanometer size objects in scanning tunneling optical microscopy (ST OM/PSTM). Exploiting both the structure of the fringe pattern perturbe d by the object and the last simulation works, we discuss the reality of the near field images, We show that interferometry seems to be a go od tool for discriminating the true optical signal from artefacts whos e origin is not always understood.