Synthetic Optical Holography

Scattering scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) provides resolution of 5-10 nm and is inherently phase-sensitive. It is also slow, the bottleneck being the determination of phase and amplitude at each pixel. Holography is an efficient, multiplex method of acquiring phase across a whole image. We report on the marriage of holography and s-SNOM, a new development that improves the speed of nanooptical imaging by orders of magnitude while simplifying the experiment. Moreover, synthetic optical holography is quite general. We show the method applied to confocal imaging where it provides phase sensitive data that may be coherently post-processed. (Figure -1)

P Scott Carney is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. He holds a BS in Engineering Physics from UIUC (1994), and a PhD in Physics from the University of Rochester (1999). He is a theorist with research interests in inverse problems, imaging, coherence theory and other branches of optical physics.