Optical imaging with a single-molecule light source

Summary form only given. With the advent of scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) ultrahigh-resolution optical microscopy has attracted renewed interest. Although after more than a decade the conventional mode of SNOM that uses a subwavelength aperture has bottomed out at a resolution of roughly 50 nm, an unlimited resolution could be expected in optical near-field microscopy. One of the conceptually simplest configurations for reaching a nearly molecular resolution is replacing a physical aperture by a single molecule as a point-like source. We present our experimental as well as theoretical results on imaging an object using the fluorescence of a single molecule.