Mind the Gap Near-field microscopy has benefited from subwavelength near-field plasmonic probes that make use of the field-concentrating properties of gaps. These probes achieve maximum enhancement only in the tip-substrate gap mode, which can yield large near-field signals, but only for a metallic substrate and for very small tip-substrate gap distances. Bao et al. (p. 1317 ) designed a probe that unites broadband field enhancement and confinement with bidirectional coupling between far-field and near-field electromagnetic energy. Their tips primarily rely on the internal gap modes of the tip itself, thereby enabling it to image nonmetallic samples.

The ability to mold the flow of light at the wavelength scale has been largely investigated in photonic-crystal-based devices, a class of materials in which the propagation of light is driven by interferences between multiply Bragg scattered waves and whose energy dispersion is described by a photonic band diagram [1]. Light propagation in such structures is defined by Bloch modes, which can be engineered by varying the structural parameters of the material [2][3][4]. In disordered media, both the direction and phase of the propagating waves are randomized in a complex manner, making any attempt to control light propagation particularly challenging. Disordered media are currently investigated in several contexts, ranging from the study of collective multiple scattering phenomena [5,6] to cavity quantum electrodynamics and random lasing [7,8], to the possibility to provide efficient solutions in renewable energy [9], imaging [10], and spectroscopy-based applications [11]. Transport in such systems can be described in terms of photonic modes, or quasi-modes, which exhibit characteristic spatial profiles and spectra [12,13]. In diffusive systems, these modes are spatially and spectrally overlapping while in the regime of Anderson localization, they become spatially and spectrally-isolated [14]. Unlike Bloch modes in periodic systems, the precise formation of photonic modes in a single realization of the disorder is unpredictable.Control over light transport can be obtained by shaping the incident wave to excite only a specific part of the modes available in a given system [15][16][17][18]. For fully exploiting the potential of disordered systems, however, a mode control is needed. It was shown 3 theoretically that isolated modes could be selectively tuned and possibly coupled to each other by a local fine modification of the dielectric structure [19,20].In this Article, we demonstrate experimentally the ability to fully control the spectral properties of an individual photonic mode in a two-dimensional disordered photonic structure [21], in a wavelength range that is relevant for photonic research driven applications. A statistical analysis of individual spatially-isolated random photonic modes is performed by multi-dimensional near-field imaging, leading to a detailed determination of intensity fluctuations, decay lengths and mode volumes. We then demonstrate that individual modes can be fine-tuned either by near-field tip perturbation or by local sub-micrometer-scale oxidation of the semiconductor slab [22]. The resonant frequency of a selected mode is gradually shifted until it is in perfect spectral superposition with the frequency of other two modes, located a few micrometers apart and spatially overlapping with the tuned mode. On spectral resonance, we observe frequency crossing and anti-crossing behaviours, respectively, the latter indicating mode interaction. This provides the experimental proof-of- (e) and (f), respectively). The main difference between the two spectra normalized to the average intensity i...

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Necklace states arise from the coupling of otherwise confined modes in disordered photonic systems and open high transmission channels in strongly scattering media. Despite their potential relevance in the transport properties of photonic systems, necklace state statistical occurrence in dimensions higher than one is hard to measure, because of the lack of a decisive signature. In this work we provide an efficient method to tell apart in a single measurement a coupled mode from a single localized state in a complex scattering problem, exploiting the analogy with wellcharacterized coupled cavities in photonic crystals. The phase spatial distribution of the electromagnetic field has been numerically calculated and analyzed as a function of the coupling strength and of detuning between interacting modes respectively for coupled photonic crystal cavities and for partially disordered systems. Results consistently show that when localized modes spectrally and spatially overlap only over a small surface extent, synchronous oscillation does not build up and the phase spatial distribution splits into two distinct peaks. Having established such bimodal distribution as a necklace hallmark, this paper opens the possibility to assess and eventually tailor the role of necklace states in random systems, e.g., by varying correlations.

The optical behavior of coupled systems, in which the breaking of parity and time-reversal symmetry occurs, is drawing increasing attention to address the physics of the exceptional point singularity, i.e., when the real and imaginary parts of the normal-mode eigenfrequencies coincide. At this stage, fascinating phenomena are predicted, including electromagnetic-induced transparency and phase transitions. To experimentally observe the exceptional points, the near-field coupling to waveguide proposed so far was proved to work only in peculiar cases. Here, we extend the interference detection scheme, which lies at the heart of the Fano lineshape, by introducing generalized Fano lineshapes as a signature of the exceptional point occurrence in resonant-scattering experiments. We investigate photonic molecules and necklace states in disordered media by means of a near-field hyperspectral mapping. Generalized Fano profiles in material science could extend the characterization of composite nanoresonators, semiconductor nanostructures, and plasmonic and metamaterial devices.