An investigation of heat transfer between a microcantilever and a substrate for improved thermal topography imaging
An investigation of heat transfer between a microcantilever and a substrate for improved thermal topography imaging
复制标题
研究微悬臂梁和基板之间的热传递以改进热形貌成像
作者：
S. Somnath;W. King
本文报道了从加热微悬臂梁到衬底的热传递的数值和实验研究，并使用由此产生的见解，以提高热形貌成像。悬臂梁的灵敏度，定义为热信号的变化，由于在地形高度的变化，是相对恒定的特征高度在100-350 nm的范围内。由于悬臂梁-基板热传递受空气中的热传导控制，因此在不同热导率的基板上，悬臂梁的灵敏度几乎是恒定的。横向尺寸大于2.5 μm的表面特征会在悬臂梁信号中产生伪影，导致测量误差高达28%。这些伪影是由悬臂在平行于表面的横向方向上的热传导引起的。我们展示了如何通过考虑这种横向传导并将其从热信号中移除来移除这些伪影。这种技术减少了多达26%的测量误差，可以应用于任意基板的形貌，并可以缩放到加热的悬臂梁阵列。这些结果可能会导致纳米尺度的热测量，包括扫描热显微镜和基于尖端的纳米纤维的改进。
This paper reports the numerical and experimental investigation of heat transfer from a heated microcantilever to a substrate and uses the resulting insights to improve thermal topography imaging. The cantilever sensitivity, defined as change in thermal signal due to changes in the topography height, is relatively constant for feature heights in the range 100–350 nm. Since the cantilever-substrate heat transfer is governed by thermal conduction through the air, the cantilever sensitivity is nearly constant across substrates of varying thermal conductivity. Surface features with lateral size larger than 2.5 μm can induce artifacts in the cantilever signal resulting in measurement errors as large as 28%. These artifacts arise from thermal conduction from the cantilever in the lateral direction, parallel to the surface. We show how these artifacts can be removed by accounting for this lateral conduction and removing it from the thermal signal. This technique reduces the measurement error by as much as 26%, can be applied to arbitrary substrate topographies, and can be scaled to arrays of heated cantilevers. These results could lead to improvements in nanometer-scale thermal measurements including scanning thermal microscopy and tip-based nanofabrication.