Magnetically refined tips for Scanning Force Microscopy

Aspects of scanning force microscope probes and their effects on dimensional measurement

“…Several groups reported the fabrication of advanced probes by the confinement of the magnetically active tip volume. A magnetic refinement was achieved by broad area deposition of a magnetic layer followed by the deposition of a mask and sputter etching (Bauer et al 1996, Jumpertz et al 1997. Tips which imaged features with a full width half maximum resolution of 42 nm were produced by depositing metallic structures onto atomic force microscope tips by evaporation through nanoscale holes fabricated in a stencil mask (Champagne et al 2003).…”

Advanced Cantilevers for Magnetic Force Microscopy and High Frequency Magnetic Force Microscopy

“…In order to improve the spatial resolution of the MFM technique, a further development of the magnetic probes is required. To achieve this goal, several approaches are described in the literature (Martin and Wickramasinghe, 1987;Göddenhenrich et al ., 1988Göddenhenrich et al ., , 1990Akama et al ., 1990;Rugar et al ., 1990;Vasile et al ., 1991;Grütter et al ., 1992;Wadas et al ., 1994;Moser et al ., 1995;Dai et al ., 1996;Jumpertz et al ., 1997;Hartmann, 1999;Wickramasinghe, 2000;Deng et al ., 2004;Winkler et al ., 2006) including three techniques that fulfil best the requirements of miniaturization: electron beam deposition (EBD) (Akama et al ., 1990;Jumpertz et al ., 1997), FIB milling (Vasile et al ., 1991) and attaching fullerene carbon multiwalled nanotubes (MWNTs) (Dai et al ., 1996) filled with magnetic material (Winkler et al ., 2006) or magnetically coated ones (Deng et al ., 2004) attached to microfabricated Si cantilever tips. The EBD and FIB approaches and the attached MWNTs proved to be the most successful ones, as the smallest sizes could be achieved: possible tip shanks could be as small as 5 nm in diameter.…”

Double Exchange Biased Magnetic Force Microscopy Tip and Comparison of Its Imaging Performance with Commercial Tips

“…[1][2][3][4] As it is with the case of any type of scanning probe microscopy techniques, there is always a demand to improve the spatial resolution of MFM. So far, various approaches have been taken by different groups to improve the spatial resolution of MFM, such as trimming the tips using focused ion beam (FIB), [5][6][7][8] producing high aspect ratio MFM tips using electron beam deposition, [9][10][11][12][13] fabricating tips using electron beam deposition and ion beam etching, [14][15][16] attaching carbon nanotubes followed by coating it with magnetic layers, [17][18][19] growing sharp tips by self-field emission 20) and coating the tips with multilayers. [21][22][23] Commercially available MFM tips are generally coated with a single layer of hard magnet with a high coercivity and low moment.…”