“…Since the proposal of the pioneering aperture structure, based on a metal coated dielectric with a subwavelength aperture left at the end, different options have been explored in order to overcome some of its fundamental drawbacks, i.e., the poor resolution limited by the size of the aperture, the low throughput and the asymmetric near field distribution at the probe apex resulting from the linearly polarized excitation [7][8][9]. Apertureless probes under far field external illumination have been indicated as a possible alternative [10][11][12][13]: although they allow the achievement of high field enhancement and high resolution, the far field illumination creates a strong background potentially deleterious for measurements on sensitive samples, as is the case for, e.g., fluorescent molecules.…”