Browsing by Author "Arstila, Timo"

Super-resolution microscopy is a collection of methods to overcome the natural barrier of diffraction limit of resolving power that conventional optical microscopes have. A microsphere assisted microscopy (MAM) is a super-resolution method that was first demonstrated in 2011. It is based on the simple principle to utilize a dielectric microsphere as an external lens in optical microscope. Our objective was to achieve the super-resolution capability in non-contact 3D surface profilometry by integrating MAM-technology and Mirau-type of white light interferometry. The essential component in our proposed technology is a probe that contains the microsphere and its surrounding medium, the immersion film. In this thesis, I introduce the properties of microspheres and its surroundings that affect to the performance of MAM according to literature. I also present our choices for probe parameters and reveal experimental results on the performance of our 3D surface profilometer. In the image resolution, we achieved comparable results to other transverse resolution studies, but in longitudinal resolution we did not succeed to reach consistent results in non-contact mode with AFM. Despite many improvements in the fabrication process, we did not achieve repeatability in the characterization measurements for probes made with same parameters.