Detection of nanomechanical vibrations by dynamic force microscopy in higher cantilever eigenmodes

The authors present a method based on dynamic force microscopy to characterize subnanometer-scale mechanical vibrations in resonant micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems. The method simultaneously employs the first eigenmode of the microscope cantilever for topography imaging and the second eigenmode for the detection of the resonator vibration. Here, they apply this scheme for the characterization of a 1.6 GHz film bulk acoustic resonator, showing that it overcomes the main limitations of acoustic imaging in contact-mode atomic force microscopy. The method provides nanometer-scale lateral resolution on arbitrarily high resonant frequency systems, which makes it applicable to a wide diversity of electromechanical systems. (C) 2007 American Institute of Physics.