Principal Investigator William Tisdale
The spatial resolution of an optical microscope is fundamentally limited – by the wavelength of light – to a few hundred nanometers. By introducing a sharp scanning probe tip into the optical field near the sample surface, spatial resolution may be improved to a few tens of nanometers or less. An additional advantage of this approach is the simultaneous acquisition of structural and spectroscopic information.
We employ a variety of NSOM modalities in our lab, including tip-enhanced fluorescence, tip-enhanced Raman scattering (TERS), optical second harmonic generation (SHG), and time-resolved variants thereof. A portion of this work is funded by the Center for Excitonics.