THE THEORY OF SNOM - A NOVEL-APPROACH

In this paper we consider the application of electromagnetic theory to the analysis of the Scanning Near-field Optical Microscope (SNOM) in order to predict experimentally observable quantities such as the tran smission or reflection coefficients for a particular tip-surface confi guration. In particular we present the first application of a transfer matrix based calculation to this challenging problem by using an adap tive coordinate transformation to accurately model the shape of the SN OM tip. We also investigate the possibility of increasing the transmit ted light through the SNOM tip by introducing a metal wire into the ce ntre of the tip. This converts the tip into a coaxial cable. We show t hat, in principle, this can dramatically improve the transmission char acteristics without having a detrimental effect on the resolution.