A single crystal piezoelectric scanner for scanning probe microscopy

In this paper, a small size monolithic XY scanner was designed and fabricated. The scanner has a flat triangular shape and consists of two 0.5mm-thick and 5mm-long lead-zinc-niobate-lead-titanate ((1x)Pb(ZnNb)O-3-xPbTiO(3)) or PZN-PT rods. The use of this material is critical to the reduction of the scanner size. The mechanical resonance characteristics for the PZN-PT rods and the assembled scanner were tested. The fabricated scanner provides a high resonance frequency and assured parallelism between the scanner and the sample surface. It enables a fast open loop control capability that naturally lends itself to use in scanning probe microscopy. The scanner and a self-sensing cantilever were integrated into a small-size atomic force microscope (AFM) design. A commercially available self-sensing cantilever and an additional actuator were used for contact scanning of a HOPG (Highly Ordered Pyrolytic Graphite) sample surface. The scanning performance of the scanner was verified by obtaining atomically resolved image of the HOPG surface.