Design of a XYZ scanner for home-made high-speed atomic force microscopy

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a useful tool in nanoscale measurement. However, conventional AFM suffers from slow scan speed, limiting the use for biological detection or nanofabrication, due to the limited bandwidth of AFM components. In which the resonant frequency of the AFM scanner is usually too low to achieve high-speed scanning. In this paper, a simple and compact home-made high-speed AFM is set up and reported. As an important part of the scanning system, a parallel kinematic piezoelectric actuator (PZT) XYZ scanner is proposed, which can achieve high bandwidth and low coupling errors. Finite element analysis (FEA) is adopted to characterize the scanner, and verified the first two lateral resonance frequency of 5.6 kHz and the vertical resonance frequency is 29 kHz. In addition, some testing experiments are implemented, demonstrating feasibility of the proposed scanner. Finally, it was applied to the home-made AFM system, and some effective scanning imaging results can be obtained.