Near-field Optical Spectroscopy on Photonic Metamaterials

The optical properties of most photonic metamaterials are dictated by electromagnetic resonances in their basic building blocks. In this work the field distributions of resonant modes in selected 2-D metamaterials are investigated experimentally with scanning near-field optical microscopy, as well as numerically. For the numerical studies a theoretical model of the transmission process through near-field aperture probes is introduced.