SBIR Phase II: Encased Cantilevers for Ultra-Sensitive Force and Mass Sensing in Liquids

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will improve the performance of encased atomic force microscopy (AFM) cantilevers, reduce their fabrication costs, and optimize their properties for next-generation scanned probe microscopy technologies. Atomic force microscopy is a workhorse technique for providing nanometer-scale information of materials, but its performance is compromised by viscous damping when operated in fluid. The encased cantilevers to be developed in this project significantly reduces damping, leading to high force sensitivity and performance which is identical to AFM imaging done in air. This aids quantitative interpretation of data and simplifies instrument operation. Encased cantilevers are a drop-in replacement, permitting the transformation of existing instruments into cutting-edge tools simply by exchanging the probe. The impacts of these products will be felt in fields from biology to clean energy to materials science. The first technical objective of this research is to create new cantilever geometries that push the performance of our devices to the theoretical limits. The Phase I research resulted in a novel low-cost technique to fabricate encased cantilevers, thanks to the development of specialized semi-automated processing and quality control tools. The next technical objective of Phase II research is to further reduce fabrication costs by improving yields, increasing batch size, and implementing more manufacturing automation. We expect to demonstrate low-cost processing methods in which many high quality probes are fabricated efficiently. The third technical objective is to optimize these devices for next-generation scanned probe technologies including quantitative nanomechanical mapping, high-speed imaging and promising novel techniques such as photo induced force microscopy. At the end of the project period we will have optimized products specifically targeting these high growth applications.