Adaptive tilting angles for a dual-probe AFM system to increase image accuracy

Adaptive tilting angles to achieve high‐precision scanning of a dual probes AFM

“…During the dual-probe scanning, the distance between two probes is expected to stay constant for the consideration of minimizing the merging error. 4(b); (3) from our previous work [19], we can deduce a related result γ= tan À1 x cn z cn À ∅ 0 À θ n 2 and since ∅ 0 , θ n , x cn , and z cn are all known values, γ is naturally computable through the above equation, plus, furthermore, we can also obtain the L value with the calculated γ based on our previous work [19]; (4) finally, we can compute the compensation parameters for the probe's position under different tilting angles (∅ 0 + θ i ) as follows: where ∅ 0 is an original tilting angle and the rotation change of the tilting angle is denoted as θ i , i = 1, 2, …, n. Here, a method of compensating the probe position is proposed, which provides an effective way to calculate the position variation of the probe after the probe is rotated.…”

“…The first part is the measuring unit I as shown in Fig. A detailed description for the design of the dual probes AFM system is shown in [19]. A similar structure is shown in Fig.…”

“…The conception of the probe's position compensation has been shown in, [19] where the compensation parameters can be obtained as follows: (1) the SEM image (See Fig. During the dual-probe scanning, the distance between two probes is expected to stay constant for the consideration of minimizing the merging error.…”

“…Due to compactness consideration, a self‐sensing and self‐actuating probe, called the Akiyama probe , is chosen and used in our dual‐probes AFM system. A detailed description for the design of the dual probes AFM system is shown in .…”

“…This paper presents a self‐developed dual probe AFM system, which includes two probe‐tilt mechanisms integrated with a new adaptive tilting‐angle algorithm (ATAA) that adjusts probes to reach the appropriate tilting angles associated with any given side walls of some samples. Compared with our previous works , new additional contributions of this paper are summarized as follows: (1) an enhanced probe's tilting algorithm, called ATAA, is proposed which can deal with n sidewalls as shown in Section 3.3; (2) a modified “result's merging algorithm” is proposed in our dual‐probe scan method in Section 3.4; (3) a proof is proposed to ensure the estimation of the sidewall angle can converge to the true value in Section 3.5; (4) a valley‐shape sample is used for a scanning test to validate the proposed method, ATAA, during which the z ‐direction artifacts are effectively eliminated as shown in Section 4.3; (5) the fish red blood cell is also scanned to show that the proposed ATAA can handle general samples as shown in Section 4.3.…”