Quantitative Electromechanical Atomic Force Microscopy
arXiv:1904.06776
Abstract
The ability to probe a materials electromechanical functionality on the nanoscale is critical to applications from energy storage and computing to biology and medicine. Voltage modulated atomic force microscopy (VM-AFM) has become a mainstay characterization tool for investigating these materials due to its unprecedented ability to locally probe electromechanically responsive materials with spatial resolution from microns to nanometers. However, with the wide popularity of VM-AFM techniques such as piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) and electrochemical strain microscopy (ESM) there has been a rise in reports of nanoscale electromechanical functionality, including hysteresis, in materials that should be incapable of exhibiting piezo- or ferroelectricity. Explanations for the origins of unexpected nanoscale phenomena have included new material properties, surface-mediated polarization changes and/or spatially resolved behavior that is not present in bulk measurements. At the same time, it is well known that VM-AFM measurements are susceptible to numerous forms of crosstalk and, despite efforts within the AFM community, a global approach for eliminating this has remained elusive. In this work, we develop a method for easily demonstrating the presence of hysteretic (ie, false ferroelectric) long-range interactions between the sample and cantilever body. This method should be easy to implement in any VM-AFM measurement. We then go on to demonstrate fully quantitative and repeatable nanoelectromechanical characterization using an interferometer. These quantitative measurements are critical for a wide range of devices including mems actuators and sensors, memristor, energy storage and memory.
46 pages, 11 figures including supplementary information
References in corpus (8)
- The Band Excitation Method in Scanning Probe Microscopy for Rapid Mapping of Energy Dissipation on the Nanoscale
- Ferroelectric domains in methylammonium lead iodide perovskite thin-films
- Dynamic Behavior in Piezoresponse Force Microscopy
- Spatially Resolved Mapping of Local Polarization Dynamics in an Ergodic Phase of Ferroelectric Relaxor
- Electrochemical Strain Microscopy of Silica Glasses
- Limitations for the determination of piezoelectric constants with piezoresponse force microscopy
- Influence of the inhomogeneous field at the tip on quantitative piezoresponse force microscopy
- Resolving Local Electrochemistry at the Nanoscale via Electrochemical Strain Microscopy: Modeling and Experiments