S. Mononobe et al., REPRODUCIBLE FABRICATION OF A FIBER PROBE WITH A NANOMETRIC PROTRUSION FOR NEAR-FIELD OPTICS, Applied optics, 36(7), 1997, pp. 1496-1500
We propose a new type of fiber probe with a nanometric protruding tip
emerging from a metal film and describe a novel method, called the sel
ective resin-coating method, for fabricating such probes. It is a repr
oducible etching process consisting of four steps and can be applied t
o silica fibers sharpened by selective chemical etching. With this met
hod, we obtained tips with the apex diameter and the foot diameter of
the protrusion being less than 10 and 30 nm, respectively, when the go
ld film was similar to 120 nm thick. (C) 1997 Optical Society of Ameri
ca.