Combined Atomic Force & Confocal Microscope
room temperature platform for ODMR
After decades of evolution in magnetic imaging, combining the sensitivity needed to detect single electron or nuclear spins with a spatial resolution of a few nanometers may soon become current state-of-the-art instrumentation: nitrogen vacancy (NV) nanomagnetometry based on the principle of optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) is commonly considered the most promising candidate to achieve this goal. While there is significant scientific activity to both reliably prepare appropriate nanodiamonds with tailored NV center characteristics and to attach them onto AFM tips, attocube is complementing these efforts by providing an ideal platform for ODMR: the attoCSFM combines a high-NA confocal microscope for optical detection in transmission with a cantilever based atomic force microscope, completely built from non-magnetic materials.
The sample environment can be adjusted from ambient pressure to low vacuum (~1 mbar), providing integrated temperature control and subsequent drifts to less than 10 nm/h. Precise relative positioning of the sample, AFM tip, high NA objective, and an optional permanent magnet is enabled via 10 degrees of freedom provided by nanopositioning stages and scanners (positioning ranges 15 mm x 15 mm x 15 mm, scan ranges 20 μm x 20 μm x 7 μm).
Further reading: T. Häberle et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 170801 (2013)
T. Häberle et al., Nat. Nanotechnol. 10, 125 (2015)
D. Schmid-Lorch et al., Nano Lett. 15, 4942 (2015)
T. Häberle et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum. 88, 013702 (2017)
Application Snippets
Customer Feedback
Dr. F. Reinhard
Physics Institute, University of Stuttgart
The turn-key, yet custom-made design saved us a great deal of time. We had a cutting-edge research setup within a few months and obtained the first major result less than one year after delivery of the instrument. Time-to-market had never been as quick as this.