Improved light extraction from emitters in high refractive index materials using solid immersion lenses

Solid immersion lenses (SILs) are optically transparent, truncated spheres, brought in contact with a sample to be imaged. The combination of a conventional optical microscope and a SIL results in a highly effective numerical aperture of the imaging system that can improve the resolution. In addition, when imaging high refractive index samples, such as semiconductors, the light collection efficiency can be increased drastically. We investigate the collection efficiency as a function of the SILs geometry and refractive index, using an analytical expression for the light dispersion through an arbitrarily truncated sphere. The theoretical results are compared to experimental measurements obtained on single quantum dots and are found to be in good agreement. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.