Electromagnetic enhancement effect in scanning tunneling microscope light emission from GaAs

The electromagnetic enhancement effect in scanning tunneling microscope (STM) light emission from GaAs has been investigated by the finite difference time domain method. We have calculated the intensity of light emitted by the recombination of minority carriers injected from the tip and majority carriers in the sample. The results depend not only on the material and the shape of the tip but also on light polarization. When the tip is tungsten whose dielectric function has a positive real part at 1.5 eV, the p-polarized light intensity depends strongly on the size of the tip and the location of recombination. However, the s-polarized light emission depends only weakly on these parameters. If the tip is a perfect metal, the p-polarized light intensity becomes a few times stronger than that for the W tip of the same shape. On the other hand, the s-polarized light intensity becomes weaker than that for the W tip due to the electromagnetic screening effect of a perfect metal. We conclude that the combination of the W tip and s-polarized light detection is suitable for precise measurement of the tip-position dependence of STM light emission properties. A tip with a negative value of the real part of dielectric function is preferable to the W tip, if one does not analyze the tip-position dependence of STM light emission, because STM light emission is enhanced relative to the case of the W tip. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.