A Novel Method of Fabrication of Metal Probes for Scanning Probe Microscopy

A novel method of fabrication of all-metal probes for scanning probe microscopy was developed. The motivation for this work was to develop probes and a method of fabricating them, which can be applied to measure friction of pairs of many different materials at the nanoscale. The main process of the presented manufacturing technique is nickel electrodeposition. The other steps are similarly simple and cheap. Moreover, the technique can be easily modified to manufacture probes of different materials and with different tip shapes.