AVS 49th International Symposium
    Nanotubes: Science and Applications Topical Conference Tuesday Sessions
       Session NT-TuM

Paper NT-TuM4
Charge Imaging and Manipulation Using Carbon Nanotube Probes

Tuesday, November 5, 2002, 9:20 am, Room C-209

Session: Nanotubes: Electronics and Field Emission
Presenter: S. Gwo, National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, ROC
Authors: S.-D. Tzeng, National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, ROC
C.-L. Wu, National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, ROC
Y.-C. You, National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, ROC
T.T. Chen, National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, ROC
S. Gwo, National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, ROC
H. Tokumoto, AIST, Japan
Correspondent: Click to Email
Direct imaging and manipulation of electric and magnetic domain structures (spontaneously or artificially formed) on the nanoscale has become increasingly important because of the recent developments in high-areal-density storage devices using charge-trapping, ferroelectric, or ferromagnetic materials. Electrostatic force microscopy (EFM) and magnetic force microscopy (MFM), variations of scanning force microscopy (SFM) which utilize nano-sized conducting or magnetic probes to sense the distributions of long-range forces, are two of the most widely used techniques for this purpose. To date, the major difficulty related to the long-range force imaging is to decouple the short-range interactions without degrading the lateral resolution. This problem is especially severe with the conventional micromachined EFM and MFM probes, typically consisted of a cantilever and a tip of conical or pyramidal shape. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are novel nanostructures which have a great potential to be used as the probing tips for the scanning probe techniques. It has been shown that CNTs are electrically conducting, mechanically robust with unprecedented elastic properties, chemically stable, and having a perfect cylindrical geometry with very large aspect ratio for imaging long-range forces. Recently, several groups have reported experimental approaches to attach a single CNT to a conventional SFM-tip. Among them, scanning electron microscope (SEM) based technique is the preferred method for preparing CNT tips with controllable tube diameters, lengths, and desired orientations. In this work, we show that CNT is an ideal tip material for "true" local probing of long-range electrostatic forces with a lateral resolution better than 5 nm. Moreover, we demonstrate that CNT tip can be used to manipulate charges on the charge-trapping media (such as Si@sub 3@N@sub 4@ thin films and Si@sub 3@N@sub 4@/SiO@sub 2@ dielectric multi-layers) with an areal density greater than 60 Gbit/in@super 2@.