FDTD Analysis of Polarization Properties and Backscattering Coefficients in Aperture-less SNOM

Abstract

Polarization properties in aperture-less scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) were investigated using the 3D finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. We found that scattered light became elliptically polarized with linear or circular-polarized light illumination, and the polarization state of scattered light was preserved. In addition, Jones matrices that express the relationship between incident light and scattered light in terms of the polarization states were successfully obtained. We succeeded in calculating the polarization state of scattered light with arbitrary polarized light illumination by using the Jones matrix method.