Abstract
It is important to suppress the wear of the scanning probe in atomic force microscope (AFM). We proposed analysis technique of nm-scale wear volume using high-resolution scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of microprobe before and after wear tests. In this report, we evaluated the wear volumes of Pt/Ir coated Si microprobes under the small contact weight (10〜200nN). It was confirmed that the minimum stable weight was 20nN and the probe pumping phenomena of AFM were observed under the 10nN contact weight condition. We found that the wear volume of the probe increases proportionally with the contact weight.
