Evanescent waves in high numerical aperture aplanatic solid immersion microscopy: effects of forbidden light on subsurface imaging.

The collection of light at very high numerical aperture allows detection of evanescent waves above the critical angle of total internal reflection in solid immersion lens microscopy. We investigate the effect of such evanescent modes, so-called forbidden light, on the far-field imaging properties of an aplanatic solid immersion microscope by developing a dyadic Green's function formalism in the context of subsurface semiconductor integrated circuit imaging. We demonstrate that the collection of forbidden light allows for sub-diffraction spatial resolution and substantial enhancement of photon collection efficiency albeit inducing wave-front discontinuities and aberrations.