Fluorescent Nanoprobes and Nanophotonics

In recent years, nanoprobe-based devices have attracted significant attention and found a wide range of applications, including nanostructure imaging, single molecular detection, and physical, chemical, and biological sensing applications. However, since the scale of nanodevices is substantially less than the optical diffraction limit, their fabrication remains a difficult challenge. Despite significant efforts, most of the fabrication techniques developed so far require expensive equipment and complicated processing procedures, which has hindered their applications. We developed a new class of fluorescent nanoprobes consist of a silica fiber taper, a single carbon nanotube, and nanoscale fluorescent elements. This nanoprobe provides a natural interface between the nanoscale structures and the microscale structure, which can significantly simplify their fabrication. Furthermore, the nanoscale fluorescent elements are produced through bottom-up processes, which can easily tailor the functionalities of such fluorescent nanoprobes to many different applications in nanophotonics, including near field imaging, nonlinear optics mapping, and quantum electrodynamics.