We have developed a new scanning microscope based on a vibrating contact tip and piezoelectric detection. Scanning the sample reveals surface topography and mainly, subsurface elastic properties. The preliminary images presented show surface and subsurface inhomogeneities in metallic samples. Lateral resolution is essentially related to the tip diameter as in near-field microscopes.

a b s t r a c tIn this paper, the theory of coupled plasma, thermal and elastic wave was used to study the vibration of semiconducting microcantilevers during photothermal process. The generalized thermoelastic model was adopted, along with plasma wave model, to obtain the vibration response of semiconducting microcantilevers under periodical laser excitation. The influence of thermal relaxation time on the vibration was investigated. The conventional and generalized thermoelastic theories for the temperature and deflection of microcantilever were compared. The simulation results for the amplitude and phase versus the modulation frequency revealed that near resonance frequency the generalized hyperbolic thermoelastic model was more suitable to describe the vibration characterization of microcantilevers than the conventional thermoelstic model.