5. Conclusion

Near-field optical microscopy is less developed than other local probe microscopies, such as STM and AFM. In the last 2 or 3 years, near-field optical microscopes have gone beyond the prototype and demonstration stage. A SNOM is currently on the market, demonstrating the interest of this new microscopy.

From a technical point of view, it remains to define the best configurations, and to improve the reliability and user-friendliness of existing devices, so as to make them usable by non-specialists. The current trend is to make devices more compact. Mixed AFM-SNOM, AFM-STOM, STM-SNOM microscopes, etc., have a bright future ahead of them, as they solve the problem of tip position control and provide useful additional information for image interpretation (topography, for example).

Numerous teams routinely succeed in obtaining images with a resolution...