A Universal Approach to Electrostatically-Blind Quantitative Piezoresponse Force Microscopy

TL;DR

This paper introduces a universal method using an electrostatic blind spot in PFM to eliminate artifacts, enabling precise, absolute quantification of nanoscale piezoelectric properties across various conditions.

Contribution

The authors develop and validate a universal ESBS-PFM technique that removes electrostatic artifacts, allowing accurate, probe-independent measurement of piezoelectric responses at the nanoscale.

Findings

Excellent agreement with interferometric PFM

Enables absolute quantification of piezoelectric coefficients

Applicable across diverse experimental conditions

Abstract

The presence of electrostatic forces and associated artifacts complicates the interpretation of piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) and electrochemical strain microscopy (ESM). Eliminating these artifacts provides an opportunity for precisely mapping domain wall structures and dynamics, accurately quantifying local piezoelectric coupling coefficients, and reliably investigating hysteretic processes at the single nanometer scale to determine properties and mechanisms which underly important applications including computing, batteries and biology. Here we exploit the existence of an electrostatic blind spot (ESBS) along the length of the cantilever, due to the distributed nature of the electrostatic force, which can be universally used to separate unwanted long range electrostatic contributions from short range electromechanical responses of interest. The results of ESBS-PFM are compared to state-of-the-art interferometric displacement sensing PFM, showing excellent agreement above their respective noise floors. Ultimately, ESBS-PFM allows for absolute quantification of piezoelectric coupling coefficients independent of probe, lab or experimental conditions. As such, we expect the widespread adoption of EBSB-PFM to be a paradigm shift in the quantification of nanoscale electromechanics.