Fabrication of Silicon Microprobes for Optical Near-Field Applications

Based upon the authors' own research and experiments, this book develops several technological approaches to using silicon micromachining techniques for fabricating microprobes without the drawbacks of conventional optical fiber probes. The authors have developed a simple, effective method for batch-process production of silicon cantilevered probes with apertures as small as 20 nanometers. They have investigated in detail the probes' optical performance characteristics and show how silicon probes overcome the limitations of the optical fiber probes in terms of production throughput, optical throughput, reproducibility, simplicity of instrumentation, and mechanical performance.