Near-Field Optical Microscopy is a valuable tool for the optical and topographic study of objects at a nanometric scale. Nanoparticles constitute important candidates for such type of investigations, as they bear an important weight for medical, biomedical, and biosensing applications. One, however, has to be careful as artifacts can be easily reproduced. In this study, we examined hybrid nanoparticles (or nanohybrids) in the near-field, while in solution and attached to gold nanoplots. We found out that they can be used for wavelength modulable near-field biosensors within conditions of artifact free imaging. In detail, we refer to the use of topographic/optical image shift and the imaging of Local Surface Plasmon hot spots to validate the genuineness of the obtained images. In summary, this study demonstrates a new way of using simple easily achievable comparative methods to prove the authenticity of near-field images and presents nanohybrid biosensors as an application.
The integral equation (IE) method is commonly used to model time-harmonic electromagnetic (EM) phenomena. One of the major challenges in its application arises in the solution of the resulting ill-conditioned matrix equation. Here, we introduce a new domain decomposition (DD) based iterative method for the IE solution of time-harmonic electromagnetic problems. There are two major ingredients in the proposed IE-DDM: (a) the method is a type of non-overlapping DD method and provides a computationally efficient and effect preconditioner for the dense matrix equation from the IE method. (b) The presented method is very suitable for dealing with multi-scale EM problem. Each sub-domain has its own characteristics length and will be meshed independently from others. Numerical results demonstrate superior performance of the IE-DDM.
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