Accurate and fast nanopositioning with piezoelectric tube scanners: Emerging trends and future challenges

Abstract

Piezoelectric tube scanners have emerged as the most widely used nanopositioning technology in modern scanning probe microscopes. Despite their impressive properties, their fast and accurate operations are hindered due to complications such as scan induced mechanical vibrations, hysteresis nonlinearity, creep, and thermal drift. This paper presents an overview of emerging innovative solutions inspired from recent advances in fields such as smart structures, feedback control, and advanced estimation aimed at maximizing positioning precision and bandwidth of piezoelectric tube scanners. The paper presents a thorough survey of the related literature and contains suggestions for future research prospects. © 2008 American Institute of Physics.