1. Laboratoire d'Optique Physique, Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles, CNRS-UPR A0005, 10 rue Vauquelin, 75005 Paris, France
2. Laboratoire EM2C, Ecole Centrale Paris, CNRS, Grande Voie des Vignes, 92295 Châtenay-Malabry Cedex, France
3. Institut Fresnel, Faculté des Sciences et Techniques de St Jérôme, CNRS, case 161, Avenue Escadrille Normandie-Niemen, 13397 Marseille cedex 20, France
4. Laboratoire d'Etudes Thermiques, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique et d'Aérotechnique, BP 109, 86960 Futuroscope Cedex, France
5. Laboratoire de Photonique et de Nanostructures, CNRS, Route de Nozay, 91460 Marcoussis, France, and Département de Chimie, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 24 Rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France
6. These authors contributed equally to this work.
7. Present addresses: Nanophotonics Laboratory-RIKEN, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan (F.F.); Saint-Gobain Recherche, 39 Quai Lucien Lefranc, 93300 Aubervilliers, France (J.-P.M.).

Correspondence to: Yannick De Wilde^1,6 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to Y.D.W. (Email: dewilde@optique.espci.fr).

Abstract

In standard near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM), a subwavelength probe acts as an optical 'stethoscope' to map the near field produced at the sample surface by external illumination¹. This technique has been applied using visible^{1, 2}, infrared³, terahertz⁴ and gigahertz^{5, 6} radiation to illuminate the sample, providing a resolution well beyond the diffraction limit. NSOM is well suited to study surface waves such as surface plasmons⁷ or surface-phonon polaritons⁸. Using an aperture NSOM with visible laser illumination, a near-field interference pattern around a corral structure has been observed⁹, whose features were similar to the scanning tunnelling microscope image of the electronic waves in a quantum corral¹⁰. Here we describe an infrared NSOM that operates without any external illumination: it is a near-field analogue of a night-vision camera, making use of the thermal infrared evanescent fields emitted by the surface, and behaves as an optical scanning tunnelling microscope^{11, 12}. We therefore term this instrument a 'thermal radiation scanning tunnelling microscope' (TRSTM). We show the first TRSTM images of thermally excited surface plasmons, and demonstrate spatial coherence effects in near-field thermal emission.

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