1. Evaluation of the electrical contact area in contact-mode scanning probe microscopy.
- Author
-
Celano, Umberto, Hantschel, Thomas, Giammaria, Guido, Chandra Chintala, Ravi, Conard, Thierry, Bender, Hugo, and Vandervorst, Wilfried
- Subjects
SCANNING probe microscopy ,ELECTRON transport ,ATOMIC force microscopy ,DIELECTRIC films ,ELECTRONIC structure - Abstract
The tunneling current through an atomic force microscopy (AFM) tip is used to evaluate the effective electrical contact area, which exists between tip and sample in contact-AFM electrical measurements. A simple procedure for the evaluation of the effective electrical contact area is described using conductive atomic force microscopy (C-AFM) in combination with a thin dielectric. We characterize the electrical contact area for coated metal and doped-diamond tips operated at low force (<200 nN) in contact mode. In both cases, we observe that only a small fraction (<10 nm
2 ) of the physical contact (~100 nm2 ) is effectively contributing to the transport phenomena. Assuming this reduced area is confined to the central area of the physical contact, these results explain the sub-10 nm electrical resolution observed in C-AFM measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]- Published
- 2015
- Full Text
- View/download PDF