Quantitative and high-resolution magnetic images obtained by STM-SQUID microscope with distance modulation technique

Abstract

We have developed an STM-SQUID microscope, in which a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) is combined with an rf-SQUID. The issue in our STM-SQUID microscope was that the obtained magnetic image was not the same as the sample's ideal magnetic field distribution. This was because the magnetic image could be affected not only by the sample's local magnetic field distribution, but also by the magnetic field distribution above the sample, namely "background field". In this work, we applied the distance modulation technique to our microscope. In this technique, the change of the SQUID output signal was detected while the distance between the sample and the probe tip was modulated in a constant amplitude. As a result, the influence of the background field was cancelled out, and the magnetic information near the sample surface was largely extracted. We successfully obtained the quantitative magnetic images in ∼100 nm spatial resolution by using the distance modulation technique.