Optical nanoscopy of transient states in condensed matter

Recently, the fundamental and nanoscale understanding of complex phenomena in both, materials research and the life sciences, has witnessed considerable progress. However, elucidating the underlying complex mechanisms, often governed by disentangled degrees of freedom such as lattice, spin, orbit, charge for solids or conformation, electric potentials and ligands for proteins, has remained an experimental challenge. . Techniques that allow for distinguishing between different contributions to these processes by their spectral and/or temporal responses and/or by their characteristic lenght scales are hence urgently required.
In this paper we demonstrate the application of scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) as a novel nano-probe for tracking transient states of matter. We introduce a sideband-demodulation technique that allows for probing exclusively the stimuli-induced change of near-field optical properties. We exemplify this development by probing the transient decay of an electron-hole plasma generated in SiGe thin films through near-infrared laser pulses. This method can universally be applied to optically track ultrafast/-slow transient processes over the whole spectral range from UV to THz frequencies.