Polarization dependency of the 3D transfer behavior in microsphere enhanced interferometry

Abstract

Enhancing the lateral resolution limit in optical microscopy and interferometry is of great interest in recent research. In order to laterally resolve structures including feature dimensions below the resolution limit, microspheres applied in the optical near-field of the specimen are shown to locally improve the resolution of the imaging system. Experimental and simulated results following this approach obtained by a high NA Linnik interferometer are analyzed in this contribution. For further understanding of the transfer characteristics, measured interference data are compared with FEM (finite element method) based simulations with respect to the polarization dependency of the relevant image information.