Abstract: As techniques have evolved, there has been an increasing need for better tools for process control and product testing. In the area of thermal measurements, as in other fields such as microscopy, telemetry, and so on, optical methods have often provided measurement solutions, by their non-invasive nature. Indeed, the heat sink phenomenon [1], which occurs whenever a material sensor is placed close to the object whose temperature is to be measured, as happens with near-field techniques (SThM methods [2] or thermal AFM where the tip is either in direct contact or very close to the surface), does not arise in optics, where the measurement can be considered non-perturbing. Various optical methods have been tested for temperature measurements: radiometry, historically the first [3, 4], thermoreflectance [5, 6] described in Chap. 13, and fluorescence [7–9]. Recently, near-field or SNOM techniques have been able to obtain excellent spatial resolution [10–12]. The main advantage with the latter techniques lies in their high spatial resolution. In contrast to far-field radiometric methods, this resolution is no longer limited by diffraction (Rayleigh criterion, where the ultimate spatial resolution is of the order of half the wavelength Dx ¼ l =2). However, it also depends sensitively on the geometry of the probe and the probe–sample distance, and it is therefore difficult to control, all the more so as the processes used to make probes remain poorly reproducible today. Furthermore, owing to the close proximity of the probe and surface, it necessarily perturbs the temperature of the surface, even if there is no real physical ‘contact’ between probe and surface. This proximity forbids any high temperature measurement, which would damage or destroy the probe [13]. Finally, it is not easy to interpret and analyse the measured signal, which contains not only thermal but also topological information.

EXPLOR_STEP=$WICRI_ROOT/Wicri/France/explor/AussoisV1/Data/Main/Exploration

HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_STEP/biblio.hfd -nk 000057 | SxmlIndent | more

HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_AREA/Data/Main/Exploration/biblio.hfd -nk 000057 | SxmlIndent | more

{{Explor lien
   |wiki=    Wicri/France
   |area=    AussoisV1
   |flux=    Main
   |étape=   Exploration
   |type=    RBID
   |clé=     ISTEX:DEEB955F8627D0CB6500DABC23F73288598895C0
   |texte=   Thermal Microscopy with Photomultipliers and UV to IR Cameras
}}