New optical near field developments: some perspectives in interferometry

This work deals with the interaction of an evanescent standing wave with nanometer size objects in scanning tunneling optical microscopy (STOM/PSTM). Exploiting both the structure of the fringe pattern perturbed by the object and the last simulation works, we discuss the reality of the near field images. We show that interferometry seems to be a good tool for discriminating the true optical signal from artefacts whose origin is not always understood.