Abstract
The field of local conductivity measurement has produced many kinds of scanning probes to measure the electricalcharacteristics at the nanoscale. However, due to the design limitations, no appropriate probe has been developed to measureand simultaneously image the electrical characteristics at 100 nm order. This research aims to fabricate a four-pOint AFMprobe in order to image electrical characteristics at 100 nm ord Four-point atomic force microscope probe for imaging the electrical characteristics of materials Lin ZHANG", Yang JU*2 and Atsushi HOSOI*2 *1Nagoya Univ. Dept. of Mechanical science and Engineering Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8603, Japan The field of local conductivity measurement has produced many kinds of scanning probes to measure the electrical characteristics at the nanoscale. However, due to the design limitations, no appropriate probe has been developed to measure and simultaneously image the electrical characteristics at 100 nm order. This research aims to fabricate a four-point AFM probe in order to image electrical characteristics at 100 nm order. Specifically, a certain tape of AFM probe for cell measurement e.g . Biolever, can be etched into four independent electrodes with an in-between space of 200 nm. The four electrodes are basically used to measure the electrical potential drop by allowing the electric current to pass through. The four-point probe is then integrated into a multimode AFM to realize the scanning and imaging simultaneously. The present experimental results show that the four-point probe fabricated can be used to image the surface topography of the Au nanowire, thereby permitting the simultaneous measurements of surface profiles and electrical characteristics of the samples at the next stage.
