A self-sensitive probe composed of a piezoelectric tuning fork and a bent optical fiber tip for scanning near-field optical/atomic force microscopy

A self sensitive probe was composed of a piezoelectric tuning fork and a bent optical fiber tip for scanning near-held optical/atomic force microscopy. The topography, optical image and fluorescent spectrograph were successfully derived-using the combined probe. The probe showed 1.1 nm vertical resolution at the tip-sample-distance regulation. The combined probe showed single or twin resonant frequency peaks while the original tuning fork has only one resonant frequency of 32.7 kHz. In the twin peaks-case, results for various combination patterns suggested that one of the peaks is the response for a free arm of the tuning fork and the other is the response for the combined arm. The near-field acoustic effect was detected in the tuning fork probe as a small effect, but the effect was not detected in the combined probe.