title: Piezoresistive AFM cantilevers surpassing standard optical beam deflection in low noise topography imaging.
abstract: Optical beam deflection (OBD) is the most prevalent method for measuring cantilever deflections in atomic force microscopy (AFM), mainly due to its excellent noise performance. In contrast, piezoresistive strain-sensing techniques provide benefits over OBD in readout size and the ability to image in light-sensitive or opaque environments, but traditionally have worse noise performance. Miniaturisation of cantilevers, however, brings much greater benefit to the noise performance of piezoresistive sensing than to OBD. In this paper, we show both theoretically and experimentally that by using small-sized piezoresistive cantilevers, the AFM imaging noise equal or lower than the OBD readout noise is feasible, at standard scanning speeds and power dissipation. We demonstrate that with both readouts we achieve a system noise of ≈0.3 Å at 20 kHz measurement bandwidth. Finally, we show that small-sized piezoresistive cantilevers are well suited for piezoresistive nanoscale imaging of biological and solid state samples in air.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Bio- and Nano-Instrumentation, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Batiment BM 3109 Station 17, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Maja
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dukic
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Bio- and Nano-Instrumentation, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Batiment BM 3109 Station 17, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Jonathan D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Adams
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Bio- and Nano-Instrumentation, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Batiment BM 3109 Station 17, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Georg E
authors.initials: GE
authors.lastname: Fantner