Parameter determination and transformation for the focusing of dielectric microspheres illuminated by optical needle

Abstract

By eliminating the spherical aberrations of microsphere we derived a simple but useful formula on the focusing of dielectric microsphere. On basis of this formula, not only can researchers determine the parameters of an optical microsphere system with super-resolution, but they can also perform parameter transformation. In order to facilitate the application, the principle of parameter transformation was summarized into three kinds of case listed in Table 1, which were all demonstrated numerically with concrete examples by finite-difference time-domain method. This formula will be conducive to the development of applications based on microsphere, such as photonic nano-jet lithography, microsphere nano-scope.