Role of in-plane polarizability of the tip in scattering near-field microscopy of a plasmonic nanoparticle.

We report that a pyramid-shaped scanning probe microscopy tip has non-zero polarizability along the in-plane direction (perpendicular to the tip axis, z) at visible frequency. The in-plane polarizability enables the scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) to measure the in-plane field component around a plasmon-resonant nanoparticle. Because of the non-zero in-plane polarizability, the cross-polarized s-SNOM images may contain contributions from the in-plane field component of an out-of-plane plasmon mode as well as the out-of-plane field component of an in-plane mode. By comparing a scattering model and experimental s-SNOM images, we estimate the polarization anisotropies of pyramid-shaped Si-tips and metal-coated Si-tips.