INVITED PAPER Special Section on Photonic Crystals and Their Device Applications Near-Field Optical Investigations of Photonic Crystal Microresonators

SUMMARY We present an overview of our work on the application of scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) to photonic crystal struc- tures. Our results show that SNOM can be used to map the subwavelength confinement of light to a point-defect in a 2D photonic crystal microres- onator. Comparison with numerical modelling shows that SNOM is able to resolve patterns in the intensity distribution that are due to the slight non- uniformity in the crystal structure. We also discuss the future possibilities for applications of different modes of SNOM to photonic crystal devices.