  A thorough understanding of biological species and of emerging nanomaterials
requires, among others, their in-depth characterization with optical techniques
capable of nano-resolution. Nanoscopy techniques based on tip-enhanced optical
effects have gained over the past years tremendous interest given their
potential to probe various optical properties with resolutions depending on the
size of a sharp probe interacting with focused light, irrespective of the
illumination wavelength. Although their popularity and number of applications
is rising, tip-enhanced nanoscopy techniques (TEN) still largely rely on probes
that are not specifically developed for such applications, but for Atomic Force
Microscopy. This cages their potential in many regards, e.g. in terms of
signal-to-noise ratio, attainable image quality, or extent of applications. In
this article we place first steps towards next-gen TEN, demonstrating the
fabrication and modelling of specialized TEN probes with known optical
properties. The proposed framework is highly flexible and can be easily
adjusted to be of o benefit to various types of TEN techniques, for which
probes with known optical properties could potentially enable faster and more
accurate imaging via different routes, such as direct signal enhancement or
novel signal modulation strategies. We consider that the reported development
can pave the way for a vast number of novel TEN imaging protocols and
applications, given the many advantages that it offers.
