An inverse problem of estimating the heat source in tapered optical fibers for scanning near-field optical microscopy

A conjugate gradient method based on inverse algorithm is applied in this study to estimate the unknown space- and time-dependent heat source in aluminum-coated tapered optical fibers for scanning near-field optical microscopy, by reading the transient temperature data at the measurement positions. No prior information is available on the functional form of the unknown heat source in the present study; thus, it is classified as the function estimation in inverse calculation. The accuracy of the inverse analysis is examined by using the simulated exact and inexact temperature measurements. Results show that an excellent estimation on the heat source and temperature distributions in the tapered optical fiber can be obtained for all the test cases considered in this study. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.