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Updated: Aug 19, 2026

Utilization of Plasmonic and Photonic Crystal Nanostructures for Enhanced Micro- and Nanoparticle Manipulation
Published on: September 27, 2011
Far-field optical microscopy with a nanometer-scale resolution based on the in-plane image magnification by surface
Igor I Smolyaninov1, Jill Elliott, Anatoly V Zayats
1Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA.
Abstract:
A new far-field optical microscopy capable of reaching nanometer-scale resolution is developed using the in-plane image magnification by surface plasmon polaritons. This approach is based on the optical properties of a metal-dielectric interface that may provide extremely large values of the effective refractive index neff up to 10(3) as seen by surface polaritons, and thus the diffraction limited resolution can reach nanometer-scale values of lambda/2neff. The experimental realization of the microscope has demonstrated the optical resolution better than 60 nm at 515 nm illumination wavelength.
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