Demonstration of aberration-robust high-frequency modulated differential confocal microscopy with an oscillating pinhole

Metrological stages such as the nano-positioning and nano-measurement machine (NPMM) can position single-digit nanometer accurately on centimeter working volumes. However, their measurement system requires a feedback to the arbitrary shaped specimen by another probe. The differential confocal microscopy (DCM) offers the possibility to have a sensitivity down to that single-digit nanometers but suffers from noise and aberration. Recently the principle of the LockIn filtering could be successfully adapted in DCM and therefore achieved a high SNR. Contrary to the there employed acoustically driven tunable GRIN lens (TAG lens) at the objective, we demonstrate a microelectromechanical system (MEMS), an AFM cantilever, as an ultrafast oscillating pinhole in front of the detector. Its first resonance at 96kHz makes it very competitive regarding acquisition speed, but the low oscillation amplitude lowers contrast. By principle inheriting the possibility to compensate a change in reflectivity, we present another advancement for the evaluation of the resulting differential signal to make it robust against sample induced systematic depth errors, e.g. a tilt-angle. This could be advantageous for DCM with static beam-paths, as well. Potentially, the highest improvement can be achieved in conjunction with the NPMM’s highly accurate measurement interferometers, because the residual error for the depth of a specimen under the influence of varying aberration is kept below 20nm.