Design and Fabrication of an Active Multiaxis Probing System for High Speed Atomic Force Microscopy

The design and fabrication of an active multiaxis probing system for high-speed atomic force microscopy is presented. The probing system employs a multiaxis compliant manipulator that is actuated by two magnetic actuators to control the tip position simultaneously along the vertical and the lateral directions. The manipulator is optimally designed to achieve high bandwidth actuation and large scanning range. A novel process to fabricate multiaxis compliant manipulators reliably by using focused ion beam milling is proposed. The fabricated active multiaxis probing system is demonstrated to have high bandwidth of actuation with the lateral and vertical resonance frequencies at 46.4 and 101.5 kHz, respectively. The lateral scanning range is estimated to be ~350 nm at a magnetic field of 20 × 10 -4 T. It enables imaging rate of 10 frame/s with pixel resolution of 100 × 100 pixels.