@article{Tao2025, 
author = {Weihao Tao and Shuhao Zhao and Hanjin Dong and Ze Zhang and Peirui Ji and Shenghan Qin and Wenbo Hu and Jinlong Zhu and Renjie Zhou and Shuming Yang},
title = {An optical carbon nanotube fibre probe for measurement of nano structures with large aspect ratio},
year = {2025},
journal = {Nano Research},
volume = {18},
number = {3},
pages = {94907254},
keywords = {carbon nanotubes, surface plasmon polaritons, fibre optic probes, nano-focusing, large aspect ratio},
url = {https://www.sciopen.com/article/10.26599/NR.2025.94907254},
doi = {10.26599/NR.2025.94907254},
abstract = {With the development of imaging and measurement technologies, scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) has achieved high signal-to-noise ratio. The resolution of a fibre probe-based SNOM system is capable of reaching 10 nm. However, SNOM applications are presently constrained to the measurement of near-field optical information to relatively straightforward structures, including quantum dots, carbon nanotubes, graphene, and so forth. The geometry of conventional fibre probes, with tips at an angle of 30°–60°, presents a challenge for accurately imaging complex surface structures. This paper proposes a carbon nanotube composite fibre probe (CNT-FP) with a large aspect ratio. The key point is that a carbon nanotube bundle is composited at the tip of conventional surface plasmon polaritons fibre probes (SPPs-FP), which are the fibre probes coated with gold film to excite the SPPs. The coupling, propagation, and focusing effects of SPPs on the carbon nanotube bundle are verified. CNT-FPs have been fabricated and applied to measure a grating with the depth of 400 nm and the width of 400 nm. The experimental results show that the measurement accuracy and imaging quality of CNT-FP are nearly one order of magnitude higher than that of conventional SPPs-FP, as evidenced by evaluation criteria such as line roughness and volatility index. Moreover, it achieves an optical resolution of 72.1 nm in the measurements of a nano structure with large aspect ratio. It provides an effective solution of measuring structures with larger aspect ratios.}
}