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On our own way to
building -
Apertureless
Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscope
In this laboratory we combined Ultrashort Pulsed Laser with Atomic Force Microscope
 
- We use
"Micra" Modelocked Ti:Sapphire Laser (Coherent) as a source of femtosecond light pulses and
Atomic
Force Microscope
"XE-120" (Park Systems
Corp.)
- Optical scheme for investigating non-linear effects in the tip-sample gap includes state-of-the-art
Raman spectrometer
SPEX 1403.
- We invented a new operational mode of AFM, which we
called
Floating
Tip. In this mode, the standard probe tip hovers over the
sample surface keeping the distance (Tip to Sample Gap)
of 1 ÷ 3 nm without ever touching it.
- We reinforced X-Y scanner of AFM with the close-loop in the
low voltage regime, thus making it suitable for accurate, controllable
and reproducible scanning of small sample areas (< 1µm).
- We realized the
Hot Tip configuration by illuminating an ordinary silicon tip with the tightly
focused
femto laser beam and thus heating it up in controlable way to a few hundreds degrees
centigrade (with the real-time tip temperature monitoring by means of Si Raman line shift measurement).
- In the Hot Tip regime, we succeded in a new kind of Floating
Tip
nano-lithography:
creating patterns on the surface of high melting temperature polymers. Below are two examples of the Hot tip non-contact nano-lithography: WIS (Weizmann Institute of Science)
and group name, melted (distantly, without direct mechanical
contact!) on the photoresist AZ4620. The width and depth of
trenches are 15 ÷ 25 and 1 ÷ 3 nm,
respectively.
Now in: Nano Letters
8 (7),
pp.2017 - 2022
(2008);
DOI:
10.1021/nl801203c
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