Nanoscale infrared absorption spectroscopy of individual nanoparticles enabled by scattering-type near-field microscopy.

Infrared absorption spectroscopy is a powerful and widely used tool for analyzing the chemical composition and structure of materials. Because of the diffraction limit, however, it cannot be applied for studying individual nanostructures. Here we demonstrate that the phase contrast in substrate-enhanced scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) provides a map of the infrared absorption spectrum of individual nanoparticles with nanometer-scale spatial resolution.