Product screencast on the NANOSENSORS™ PointProbe® Plus XY-Alignment Series, held by the head of NANOSENSORS™ R&D department Thomas Sulzbach.
A common problem of probe mounting in the AFM is the re-positioning of the tip after probe exchange. The laser must be re-aligned to the cantilever and eventually the feature of interest must be re-located.
For more than 15 years NANOSENSORS™ is offering AFM probes with self-alignment features and alignment chips (ALIGN) to overcome this problem. If the AFM head is equipped with a NANOSENSORS™ alignment chip each probe mounted to the AFM will automatically be precisely aligned to continue experiments without major re-alignments. All NANOSENSORS™ PointProbe® Plus AFM probes are equipped with alignment grooves and will be exactly aligned when plugged into the alignment chip.
Now, the PointProbe® Plus XY Alignment Series ensures an identical tip position after probe exchange and extends the self-alignment concept to probes of different type and different cantilever lengths.
For achieving a self-alignment in direction along the cantilever axis, the support chips of the XY-alignment series are adjusted to the particular length of the cantilever. The support chip of long cantilevers is shorter. That of short cantilevers is longer. By that, the tip is always at the same position, independent from the cantilever length. The tip repositioning accuracy for different probe types is better than ± 8µm.