Conductive Atomic Force Microscopy-Ultralow-Current Measurement Systems for Nanoscale Imaging of a Surface's Electrical Properties.

One of the most advanced and versatile nanoscale diagnostic tools is atomic force microscopy. By enabling advanced imaging techniques, it allows us to determine various assets of a surface, including morphological, electrical, mechanical, magnetic, and thermal properties. Measuring local current flow is one of the very important methods of evaluation for, for instance, photovoltaic materials or semiconductor structures and other nanodevices.

Atomic force microscopy in mechanical measurements of single nanowires.

In this paper, we present the results of mechanical measurement of single nanowires (NWs) in a repeatable manner. Substrates with specifically designed mechanical features were used for NW placement and localization for measurements of properties such as Young's modulus or tensile strength of NW with an atomic force microscopy (AFM) system. Dense arrays of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires were obtained by one-step anodic oxidation of metallic Zn foil in a sodium bicarbonate electrolyte and thermal post-treatment.

Wavelet-based information theory in quantitative assessment of AFM images' quality.

The quantitative assessment of the image quality produced by atomic force microscopy (AFM) is an ongoing and challenging task. In our study, we demonstrate Shannon's application of information theory for measuring image quality. Specifically, we propose quantifying the loss of image information due to the various distortion processes by exploring the relationship between image information based on the information channel capacity (ICC), spectral image representation, and visual quality.

Electrical, thermal and noise properties of platinum-carbon free-standing nanowires designed as nanoscale resistive thermal devices.

Platinum-carbon (PtC) composite nanowires were fabricated using focused electron beam induced deposition and postprocessed, and their performance as a nanoscale resistive thermal device (RTD) was evaluated. Nanowires were free-standing and deposited on a dedicated substrate to eliminate the influence of the substrate itself and of the halo effect on the results. The PtC free-standing nanowires were postprocessed to lower their electrical resistance using electron beam irradiation and thermal annealing using Joule heat both separately and combined.