Design and optimization of tapered structure of near-field fiber probe based on FDTD simulation

The finite-difference time-domain method was employed to simulate light propagation in tapered near-field fiber probes with small metal aperture. By conducting large-volume simulations, including tapered metal-cladding waveguide and connected optical fiber waveguide, we illustrated the coupling between these guiding modes as well as the electric field distribution in the vicinity of the aperture. The high collection efficiency of a double-tapered probe was reproduced and was ascribed to the shortening of the cutoff region and the efficient coupling to the guiding mode of the optical fiber. The dependence of the efficiency on the tapered structure parameters was also examined.Comment: 4 Pages including 3 Figure

A Fusion-Spliced Near-Field Optical Fiber Probe Using Photonic Crystal Fiber for Nanoscale Thermometry Based on Fluorescence-Lifetime Measurement of Quantum Dots

We have developed a novel nanoscale temperature-measurement method using fluorescence in the near-field called Fluorescence Near-field Optics Thermal Nanoscopy (Fluor-NOTN). Fluor-NOTN enables the temperature distributions of nanoscale materials to be measured in vivo/in situ. The proposed method measures temperature by detecting the temperature dependent fluorescence lifetimes of Cd/Se Quantum Dots (QDs). For a high-sensitivity temperature measurement, the auto-fluorescence generated from a fiber probe should be reduced. In order to decrease the noise, we have fabricated a novel near-field optical-fiber probe by fusion-splicing a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) and a conventional single-mode fiber (SMF). The validity of the novel fiber probe was assessed experimentally by evaluating the auto-fluorescence spectra of the PCF. Due to the decrease of auto-fluorescence, a six- to ten-fold increase of S/N in the near-field fluorescence lifetime detection was achieved with the newly fabricated fusion-spliced near-field optical fiber probe. Additionally, the near-field fluorescence lifetime of the quantum dots was successfully measured by the fabricated fusion-spliced near-field optical fiber probe at room temperature, and was estimated to be 10.0 ns

Photoluminescence properties of single Mn-doped CdS nanocrystals studied by scanning near-field optical microscopy

We have fabricated Mn-doped CdS (CdS:Mn) nanocrystals embedded in Al2O3 matrices by sequential ion implantation and studied their photoluminescence (PL) properties by a scanning near-field optical microscope (SNOM). In the PL spectra of CdS:Mn nanocrystals measured by the SNOM, several sharp PL lines and a broad PL band were observed. The sharp PL lines are related to bound excitons at shallow impurities in CdS nanocrystals. The Mn-related PL spectrum is very broad even in single nanocrystals at low temperatures, and both the peak energy and the spectral width of the PL band depend on the excitation laser intensity. The PL properties of single CdS:Mn nanocrystals are discussed

Investigation of Eigenmode-Based Coupled Oscillator Solver Applied to Ising Spin Problems

We evaluate a coupled oscillator solver by applying it to square lattice (N × N) Ising spin problems for N values up to 50. The Ising problems are converted to a classical coupled oscillator model that includes both positive (ferromagnetic-like) and negative (antiferromagnetic-like) coupling between neighboring oscillators (i.e., they are reduced to eigenmode problems). A map of the oscillation amplitudes of lower-frequency eigenmodes enables us to visualize oscillator clusters with a low frustration density (unfrustrated clusters). We found that frustration tends to localize at the boundary between unfrustrated clusters due to the symmetric and asymmetric nature of the eigenmodes. This allows us to reduce frustration simply by flipping the sign of the amplitude of oscillators around which frustrated couplings are highly localized. For problems with N = 20 to 50, the best solutions with an accuracy of 96% (with respect to the exact ground state) can be obtained by simply checking the lowest ~N/2 candidate eigenmodes