Near-field effects on coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy imaging

We introduce a numerical method, the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, to study the near-field effects on coherent anti-Stokes Raman Scattering (CARS) microscopy on nanoparticles. Changes of the induced nonlinear polarization, scattering patterns, and polarization properties against different diameters of spherical nanoparticles are calculated and discussed in details. The results show that due to near-field effects, the induced nonlinear polarization is significantly enhanced at the water-particle interface, with 1.5-fold increase in intensity compared to that inside the particles, and the near-field enhancement increases with decreasing diameters of nanoparticles. The enhanced scattering dominates over the scattering contribution from the particles when the nanoparticle size decreases down to the scale of less than a half wavelength of excitation light. Further studies show that near-field effects make the induced perpendicular polarization of CARS signals being strictly confined within the nanoparticles and the particle-water interface, and this perpendicular polarization component could contribute approximately 20% to the backward scattering. The ratio values of the perpendicular polarization component to the total CARS signals from nanoparticles sizing from 75 nm to 300 nm in backward scattering are approximately 3 to 5 times higher than those in forward scattering. Therefore, near-field effects can play an important role in CARS imaging. Employing the perpendicular polarization component of CARS signals can significantly improve the contrast of CARS images, and be particularly useful for revealing the fine structures of bio-materials with nano-scale resolutions.