Optical microscopy with a single-molecule light source

Summary form only given. With the advent of scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) ultra high resolution optical microscopy has attracted a large interest. 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. In this talk we present optical images taken, for the first time, with a single molecule as a light source. We use the method of single molecule spectroscopy in order to optically detect a single impurity molecule embedded in a weakly doped organic crystal cooled to T=1.4 K.