Ultrananocrystalline diamond tip integrated onto a heated atomic force microscope cantilever. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • We report a wear-resistant ultrananocrystalline (UNCD) diamond tip integrated onto a heated atomic force microscope (AFM) cantilever and UNCD tips integrated into arrays of heated AFM cantilevers. The UNCD tips are batch-fabricated and have apex radii of approximately 10 nm and heights up to 7 m. The solid-state heater can reach temperatures above 600 C and is also a resistive temperature sensor. The tips were shown to be wear resistant throughout 1.2 m of scanning on a single-crystal silicon grating at a force of 200 nN and a speed of 10 m s(-1). Under the same conditions, a silicon tip was completely blunted. We demonstrate the use of these heated cantilevers for thermal imaging in both contact mode and intermittent contact mode, with a vertical imaging resolution of 1.9 nm. The potential application to nanolithography was also demonstrated, as the tip wrote hundreds of polyethylene nanostructures.

published proceedings

  • Nanotechnology

altmetric score

  • 30.5

author list (cited authors)

  • Kim, H. J., Moldovan, N., Felts, J. R., Somnath, S., Dai, Z., Jacobs, T., ... King, W. P.

citation count

  • 12

complete list of authors

  • Kim, Hoe Joon||Moldovan, Nicolaie||Felts, Jonathan R||Somnath, Suhas||Dai, Zhenting||Jacobs, Tevis DB||Carpick, Robert W||Carlisle, John A||King, William P

publication date

  • December 2012