Fast nanotopography imaging using a high speed cantilever with integrated heater-thermometer.

This paper presents a high speed tapping cantilever with an integrated heater-thermometer for fast nanotopography imaging. The cantilever is much smaller and faster than previous heated cantilevers, with a length of 35 µm and a resonant frequency of 1.4 MHz. The mechanical response time is characterized by scanning over a backward-facing step of height 20 nm. The mechanical response time is 77 µs in air and 448 µs in water, which compares favorably to the fastest commercial cantilevers that do not have integrated heaters. The doped silicon cantilever is designed with an integrated heater that can heat and cool in about 10 µs and can operate in both air and water. We demonstrate standard laser-based topography imaging along with thermal topography imaging, when the cantilever is actuated via the piezoelectric shaker in an atomic force microscope system and when it is actuated by Lorentz forces. The cantilever can perform thermal topography imaging in tapping mode with an imaging resolution of 7 nm at a scan speed of 1.46 mm s(-1).

Quantitative thermopower profiling across a silicon p-n junction with nanometer resolution.

Thermopower (S) profiling with nanometer resolution is essential for enhancing the thermoelectric figure of merit, ZT, through the nanostructuring of materials and for carrier density profiling in nanoelectronic devices. However, only qualitative and impractical methods or techniques with low resolutions have been reported thus far. Herein, we develop a quantitative S profiling method with nanometer resolution, scanning Seebeck microscopy (SSM), and batch-fabricate diamond thermocouple probes to apply SSM to silicon, which requires a contact stress higher than 10 GPa for stable electrical contact. The distance between the positive and negative peaks of the S profile across the silicon p-n junction measured by SSM is 4 nm, while the theoretical distance is 2 nm. Because of its extremely high spatial resolution, quantitative measurement, and ease of use, SSM could be a crucial tool not only for the characterization of nano-thermoelectric materials and nanoelectronic devices but also for the analysis of nanoscale thermal and electrical phenomena in general.

Thermoelectric voltage at a nanometer-scale heated tip point contact.

We report thermoelectric voltage measurements between the platinum-coated tip of a heated atomic force microscope (AFM) cantilever and a gold-coated substrate. The cantilevers have an integrated heater-thermometer element made from doped single crystal silicon, and a platinum tip. The voltage can be measured at the tip, independent from the cantilever heating. We used the thermocouple junction between the platinum tip and the gold substrate to measure thermoelectric voltage during heating. Experiments used either sample-side or tip-side heating, over the temperature range 25-275 °C. The tip-substrate contact is ∼4 nm in diameter and its average measured Seebeck coefficient is 3.4 µV K(-1). The thermoelectric voltage is used to determine tip-substrate interface temperature when the substrate is either glass or quartz. When the non-dimensional cantilever heater temperature is 1, the tip-substrate interface temperature is 0.593 on glass and 0.125 on quartz. Thermal contact resistance between the tip and the substrate heavily influences the tip-substrate interface temperature. Measurements agree well with modeling when the tip-substrate interface contact resistance is 10(8) K W(-1).

Lorentz force actuation of a heated atomic force microscope cantilever.

We report Lorentz force-induced actuation of a silicon microcantilever having an integrated resistive heater. Oscillating current through the cantilever interacts with the magnetic field around a NdFeB permanent magnet and induces a Lorentz force that deflects the cantilever. The same current induces cantilever heating. With AC currents as low as 0.2 mA, the cantilever can be oscillated as much as 80 nm at resonance with a DC temperature rise of less than 5 °C. By comparison, the AC temperature variation leads to a thermomechanical oscillation that is about 1000 times smaller than the Lorentz deflection at the cantilever resonance. The cantilever position in the nonuniform magnetic field affects the Lorentz force-induced deflection, with the magnetic field parallel to the cantilever having the largest effect on cantilever actuation. We demonstrate how the cantilever actuation can be used for imaging, and for measuring the local material softening temperature by sensing the contact resonance shift.

2-ω and 3-ω temperature measurement of a heated microcantilever.

This article describes temperature measurement of a heated atomic force microscope cantilever using the 2ω and 3ω harmonics of the cantilever temperature signal. When the cantilever is periodically heated, large temperature oscillations lead to large changes in the cantilever electrical resistance and also lead to nonconstant temperature coefficient of resistance. We model the cantilever heating to account for these sources of nonlinearity, and compare models with experiment. When the heating voltage amplitude is 17.9 V over the driving frequency range 10 Hz-34 kHz, the cantilever temperature oscillation is between 5 °C and 200 °C. Over this range, the corrected 2ω method predicts cantilever temperature to within 16% and the corrected 3ω method predicts the cantilever temperature within 3%. We show a general method for predicting the periodic cantilever temperature, sources of errors, and corrections for these errors.