Scanning Near-Field Optical Microscopy: Recent Advances in Disordered and Correlated Disordered Photonics

Abstract

Disordered and correlated disordered photonic materials have emerged in the past few decades and have been rapidly proposed as a complementary alternative to ordered photonics. These materials have thrived in the field of photonics, revealing the considerable impact of disorder with and without structural correlations on the scattering, transport, and localization of light in matter. Scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) has proven to be a fundamental tool for the study of the interaction between light and matter at the nanoscale in such systems, allowing for the investigation of optical properties and local electromagnetic fields with extremely high spatial resolution, surpassing the diffraction limit of conventional optical microscopy. In this review, the most important and recent advances obtained for disordered and correlated disordered luminescent structures by means of the aperture SNOM technique are addressed, showing how it allows the tailoring of local density of states (LDOS), as well as providing access to statistical analysis for multi-resonance disordered and hyperuniform disordered structures at telecom wavelengths.

Keywords

• near-field
• disorder
• correlated disorder
• photonic crystal
• hyperuniformity