A novel scanning force microscopy probe with thermal-electrical actuation and piezo-resistive sensing

This work presents a novel scanning force microscopy probe with electro-thermal actuation and piezo-resistive detection. The fabricated probe of 270 × 58 × 2.5 μ m 3 can generate a force between 1.05 μ N and 16.52 μ N with a resolution of nano-newton, and can detect the nanometer-scale deflection. The minimum detectable output signal of the probe could be down to 20 μ V and the sensitivity reaches 4.92 mV μ m −1 . This is a straight-forward technique for characterizing the mechanical properties of micro/nano-structures and devices.