Parabolic Mirror Microscope

Although bearing a name containing also "near-field optics" as other subgroups, the parabolic mirror near-field optics lab owns its distinctive characteristic by replacing the conventional objective lens with a parabolic mirror for the laser focusing and signal collections. As one of the pioneer groups who dedicate years of human resources, financial supports, efforts,and emotion in the parabolic mirror optics, our lab systemetically investigated various of aspects ranging from the theory about the parabolic mirror optics to the construction of the parabolic mirror optical microscope (link to the instrument).

Complementary to the confocal parabolic mirror optical microscope which investigate optical events at a diffraction limited resolution, we constructed the parabolic mirror near-field optical microscope combinning the scanning probe microscopic technique (tunning fork AFM) with the confocal optical microscope, which amazingly pushes down the optical resolution to less than 10 nm. Benifited from the extraodinarilly strong longitudinal electromagnetic field in the parabolic mirror focus as well as the position of the parabolic mirror for focusing and signal collection, we are able to look into extremely week optical processess (e.g. Raman scattering) with greatly enhanced sensitivity from all kinds of solid samples regardless their opaque properties, which has been a bottle neck problem for many other types of near-field microscopes.

We recently shifted the emphasis of our research interests from developing the foundamental knowledge about the parabolic mirror optics to the applications in a varieties of fields:

• plasmonics
• non-linear optical processes
• organic solar cell blend film
• biomolecular interactions

More Information on the pages of AG Zhang.