  Optical near fields are at the heart of various applications in sensing and
imaging. We investigate dipole scattering as a parameter estimation problem and
show that optical near-fields carry more information about the location and the
polarizability of the scatterer than the respective far fields. This increase
in information originates from and occurs simultaneously with the scattering
process itself. Our calculations also yield the far-field localization limit
for dipoles in free space.
