AFM-VNA Technique Enables Compound, Calibrated Electrical and Spatial Measurements at Nanoscale

摘要

Measuring electromagnetic properties of materials can provide insight into applications in many areas of science and technology. Increasingly, these properties need to be evaluated at the nanometer scale. Since electromagnetic properties, such as the dielectric constant, are ultimately related to a materials molecular structure, correlating the detailed physical structure of a material with its electromagnetic properties is frequently more valuable than the knowledge of either alone. Developed by Agilent Technologies, scanning microwave microscopy (SMM) is a technique that combines the compound, calibrated electrical measurement capabilities of a microwave vector network analyzer (VNA) with the nanoscale spatial resolution and angstrom-scale positioning of an atomic force microscope (AFM) (see Figure 1).