Surface Enhanced Ellipsomteric Contrast (SEEC) microscopy : optical microscopy as a means of nanoscale characterization

In recent decades, numerous signal amplification techniques have been developed to push back the limits of detection. The vast majority of these involve the use of substrates with very specific properties. Indeed, supports made of thin films or micro- or nanostructured layers are now used in fields such as label-free biological analysis, RAMAN spectroscopy and SNOM microscopy... Contrast-amplifying supports have also been developed for optical microscopy, but their performance has so far been very limited. Indeed, optical microscopy poses particular constraints due to the geometry of the incident illumination beam. A recent study on the modeling of the light path in polarized light has led to the development of supports that meet contrast amplification requirements. Thanks to their characteristics, these supports can be used with a standard optical microscope to visualize layers and objects of nanometric thickness (nanofilm, biofilm, biochip, DNA strand, nanoparticle, carbon nanotube, graphene sheet, etc.).