Focal Point: Imaging Optical Near‐field in Plasmonic Nanostructures

International audienceOver the past five years, new developments in the field of plasmonics have emerged with the desire to finely tune a variety of metallic nanostructures to enable a desired function. The use of plasmonics in spectroscopy is of course of great interest due to large local enhancements in the optical near-field confined in the vicinity of a metal nanostructure. For a given metal, such enhancements are dependent on the shape of the structure as well as the optical parameters (wavelength, phase, polarization) of the impinging light, offering a large degree of control over the optical and spatial localization of the plasmon resonance. In this focal point, we highlight recent work that aims at revealing the spatial position of the localized plasmon resonances using a variety of optical and non-optical methods