The fabrication of metallic tips with a silicon cantilever for probe-based ferroelectric data storage and their durability experiments.

This paper reports on the development and evaluation of various probes consisting of silicon cantilevers with different types of tips made of platinum, ruthenium, chromium and conductive CVD diamond for probe-based ultrahigh density ferroelectric data storage. Using the metal-tip probes, data bits on a medium can be written and read with contact operation. Durability experiments of the various tips against a ferroelectric material are performed. The most detrimental tip wear occurred for platinum, while wear was much less apparent for the remaining tips. Reading and writing experiments on an LiTaO(3) plate are also performed on the basis of scanning nonlinear dielectric microscopy using ruthenium- and chromium-tip probes.