Nanoscale optical thermometry using a time-correlated single-photon counting in an illumination-collection mode

Abstract

A nanoscale thermometry method called fluorescence near-field optics thermal nanoscopy (Fluor-NOTN) has been developed using near-field fluorescence imaging. This method can detect local temperature distributions with a nanoscale spatial resolution by measuring the fluorescence lifetimes of Cd/Se quantum dots (QDs) as a temperature probe. To increase the sensitivity of Fluor-NOTN, time-correlated single-photon counting (TCSPC) was introduced with a triple-tapered fusion-spliced near-field (TFN) optical fiber probe. This highly sensitive technique for measuring the fluorescence lifetime of QDs enabled the detection of low-level light signals with a picosecond time resolution at high-precision in an illumination-collection mode for Fluor-NOTN. The feasibility of this proposed method was experimentally verified by measuring the temperature dependence of the fluorescence lifetimes of the QDs by Fluor-NOTN using TCSPC with a TFN optical fiber probe with an aperture of 70 nm.