Recent progress in the engineering of plasmonic structures has enabled new kinds of nanometer-scale optoelectronic devices as well as high-resolution optical sensing. But until now, there has been a lack of tools for measuring nanometer-scale behavior in plasmonic structures which are needed to understand device performance and to confirm theoretical models. The article describing the research, Near-field infrared absorption of plasmonic semiconductor microparticles studied using atomic force microscope infrared spectroscopy, appears in Applied Physics Letters.