Material dependence of magnetic force microscopy performance using carbon nanotube probes: Experiments and simulation

Abstract

We investigated the dependence of the performance of magnetic force microscopy (MFM) on magnetic coating materials by using carbon nanotube (CNT) probes. The magnetic structures of CNT-MFM probes with CoFe(80:20), CoFe(30:70), and CoCr(80:20) coatings were essentially the same in the simulations, but their magnetic properties, such as stability after magnetic reversal, varied slightly in the experiments. It was found that a larger saturation magnetic moment (Ms) is of advantage for attaining high spatial resolution. Although the distinction was hard to see in the MFM images, the experiments and simulations showed that CNT probes coated with high Ms materials gave stronger perturbations to soft magnetic materials than probes coated with low Ms materials.