Development of All-Diamond Scanning Probes Based on Faraday Cage Angled Etching Techniques
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MRS Advances © 2020 Materials Research Society DOI: 10.1557/adv.2020.147
Development of All-Diamond Scanning Probes Based on Faraday Cage Angled Etching Techniques C. Giese, P. Quellmalz and P. Knittel
Fraunhofer IAF, Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics, Freiburg/Germany
ABSTRACT We are proposing a novel fabrication method for single crystal diamond scanning probes for atomic force microscopy (AFM), exploiting Faraday cage angled etching (FCAE). Common, oxygen-based, inductively coupled plasma (ICP) dry etching processes for diamond are limited with respect to the achievable geometries. The fabrication of freestanding micro- and nanostructures is therefore challenging. This is a major disadvantage for several application fields e.g., for realizing scanning magnetometry probes based on nitrogen vacancy (NV) centres and capable of measuring magnetic fields at the nanoscale. Combining a planar design with FCAE and state-of-the-art electron beam lithography (EBL) yields a reduction of process complexity and cost compared to the established fabrication technology of microopto-mechanical diamond devices. Here, we report on the direct comparison of both approaches and present first proof-of-concept planar-FCAE-prototypes for scanning probe applications.
INTRODUCTION: Diamond is well known for its outstanding properties such as extraordinary mechanical hardness, high thermal conductivity, wide bandgap, extremely broadband optical transparency or chemical inertness, which renders it an ideal material for various application fields [1-3]. Amongst these are single crystal-based scanning probes exhibiting excellent mechanical hardness. In recent years, it was demonstrated that colour centres in diamond could be exploited as atomically small sensors that allow for complex, highly sensitive and combined measurements in scanning probe microscopes [4]. The NV centre in diamond is the most studied among the numerous diamond point defects for applications in the fields of quantum communication, quantum computing and quantum sensing [5-9]. Combining probe tips with single NV centres at the tip apex have
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paved the way for highly sensitive, quantitative sensing of magnetic fields on the nanometre scale [10-12]. Over the last decade, a common fabrication method for opto-mechanical diamond devices for such NV scanning probes has been established, utilizing the thinning of commercially available diamond substrates, EBL and ICP-etching [13-15]. However, this membrane-based fabrication of diamond scanning probes is a lengthy and costly process. We therefore propose a new approach based on Faraday cage angled etching (FCAE), a technique which was developed in silicon semiconductor processing and first successfully applied to diamond in the Lončar group at Harvard University [16], especially focuse
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