Fabrication of long tip AFM probes for highly coarse samples

Abstract

A long polymeric tip has been fabricated for AFM measurements, which is able to image large and highly coarse objects such as biological and food samples. Two-photon adsorbed photo-polymerization technique provides a long polymeric tip onto a commercial cantilever. The length of the long polymeric tip was 90µm. Brown rice flours with ∼3µm diameter were imaged using the fabricated long tip. The result AFM image clearly showed coarse surface, which cannot be approached by a commercial tip. Since the fabricated tip has conical structure, a clear image of brown rice flours were achieved without sharp cliff-like patterns, which imaged by the commercial pyramidal shape tip.