Scattering theory of Bardeen's formalism for tunneling: new approach to near-field microscopy
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1Laboratoire d'Energetique Moleculaire et Macroscopique, Combustion, Ecole Centrale Paris, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 92295 Chatenay-Malabry Cedex, France.
Abstract:
We propose a new theoretical approach to near-field microscopy, which allows one to deal with scanning tunneling microscopy and scanning near-field optical microscopy with a unified formalism. Under the approximation of weak tip-sample coupling, we show that Bardeen's perturbation formula, originally derived for electron tunneling, can be derived from a scattering formalism which extends its validity to electromagnetic vector fields. This result should find broad applications in near-field imaging and spectroscopy.
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