High resolution, high collection efficiency in numerical aperture increasing lens microscopy of individual quantum dots -: art. no. 071905

We demonstrate the application of a subsurface solid immersion technique to the photoluminescence spectroscopy of individual quantum dots. Contrasted with the conventional solid immersion microscopy, we used a numerical aperture increasing lens and moved the interface between the sample and the solid immersion lens away from the focal plane, thus diminished the influence of interface artifacts on the images obtained in a two-dimensional scan. Meanwhile, our technique has achieved a high spatial resolution of lambda/3 that is capable of resolving the spectroscopic features of single QDs. We also demonstrate that the collection efficiency of our system is six times better than that of a conventional confocal microscope with a high NA objective. (C) 2005 American Institute of Physics.