Study on control method of AFM probe based nanomanipulation

Abstract

Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) based nanomanipulation has been extensively investigated for many years. However, efficiency and accuracy of AFM based nanomanipulation is still a major issue due to the nonlinearities and uncertainties in nanomanipulation. The compensation of drift, creep, hysteresis and some other nonlinearities generating large spatial uncertainties has been studied by some research groups. The compensation of these uncertainties does help to improve the accuracy of nanomanipulation to a certain extent. However, the deformation of the cantilever is one of the major nonlinearities affecting the accuracy during manipulations. It is difficult to control the tip position precisely due to the uncertainty of the deformation. A promising way to solve this problem is to actively change the nominal rigidity of the cantilever. This paper focused on the accurate control of active AFM probe based on survey of existing way to eliminate the deformation. The experimental results have verified the theoretical model and demonstrated that the precise position control. Copyright © 2007 by ASME.