Prospect of New AFM Probe Design Enabled by Stress Gradient

Fabrication recipes usually are designed to eliminate residual stress, while majority of electrostatic models considers fringing field to be negligible. The work presented here tries to make a benefit of these two to make a new design for an AFM probe. The curvature caused by residual stress was experimentally exported from profilometer into COMSOL to show the effect of curvature on the probe's static behavior (under DC voltage) at two different beam lengths. The results show that the curvature could turn the forcing on the probe from repulsive to attractive, which is analogues to results in existing literature.