Development of Scanning Thermal Microscopy with sub-nanometer lateral resolution

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Scanning thermal microscopy (SThM) is a variant of atomic force microscopy (AFM) that uses a heat-sensing cantilever probe. The heat generated by this cantilever probe can be used to study the thermal resistivity of surfaces and devices at the nano scale, as well as for the fabrication of masks of a few nanometers half-pitch that can be used for the patterning semiconductor substrates and prototype device fabrication. The main goal of this project was to combine the heating cantilever probe technology developed by IBM for the "millipede project" with our expertise in the development of instrumentation for atomic resolution AFM to push the resolution limits of SThM. We reached our goal of developing a high-resolution SThM operative in UHV environment.