Light focusing through a microbead leads to the formation of a photonic nanojet functional
for enhancing the spatial resolution of traditional optical systems. Despite numerous works
that prove this phenomenon, a method to appropriately translate the nanojet on top of a
region of interest is still missing. Here, by using advanced 3D fabrication techniques we
integrated a microbead on an AFM cantilever thus realizing a system to efficiently position
nanojets. This fabrication approach is robust and can be exploited in a myriad of …

Results Initially, we evaluated the capacity of our approach to translate and position a
microbead across an extended sample. In this case, we used a structure consisting of the
letters “iit” fabricated on a gold-coated glass substrate by FIB lithography. Notably, each
letter contained a sub-structure comprised of lines with a periodicity of 380 nm (Fig. 1a). An
image acquired using a 50x long working distance objective (NA 0.5, working distance 10.3
mm, Olympus LMPLANFL) with transmitted 405 nm light from a blue LED is presented in Fig …