Fabrication of Ultra-Sharp Tips by Dynamic Chemical Etching Process for Scanning Near-Field Microwave Microscopy

This work details an effective dynamic chemical etching technique to fabricate ultra-sharp tips for Scanning Near-Field Microwave Microscopy (SNMM). The protruded cylindrical part of the inner conductor in a commercial SMA (Sub Miniature A) coaxial connector is tapered by a dynamic chemical etching...

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Veröffentlicht in:Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2023-03, Vol.23 (6), p.3360
Hauptverfasser: Joseph, C H, Capoccia, Giovanni, Lucibello, Andrea, Proietti, Emanuela, Sardi, Giovanni Maria, Bartolucci, Giancarlo, Marcelli, Romolo
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Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:This work details an effective dynamic chemical etching technique to fabricate ultra-sharp tips for Scanning Near-Field Microwave Microscopy (SNMM). The protruded cylindrical part of the inner conductor in a commercial SMA (Sub Miniature A) coaxial connector is tapered by a dynamic chemical etching process using ferric chloride. The technique is optimized to fabricate ultra-sharp probe tips with controllable shapes and tapered down to have a radius of tip apex around ∼1 μm. The detailed optimization facilitated the fabrication of reproducible high-quality probes suitable for non-contact SNMM operation. A simple analytical model is also presented to better describe the dynamics of the tip formation. The near-field characteristics of the tips are evaluated by finite element method (FEM) based electromagnetic simulations and the performance of the probes has been validated experimentally by means of imaging a metal-dielectric sample using the in-house scanning near-field microwave microscopy system.
ISSN:1424-8220
1424-8220
DOI:10.3390/s23063360