V-Shaped Domain Wall Probes for Calibrated Magnetic Force Microscopy

Magnetic force microscopy (MFM) qualitatively resolves stray magnetic fields, but its fundamental flaws include limited quantitative analysis and difficulties in measuring samples with heterogeneous magnetic areas. We propose a custom-made domain wall probe (DWP) with a V-shaped magnetic nanostructure on one face of a non-magnetic probe, which behaves as a low moment probe with high coercivity to reduce magnetic switching in the presence of strong stray fields. The performance of the DWP is compared against commercial standard and low moment probes with different approaches to quantify resolution from striped domain structures of a thin reference film. The three probes are calibrated by acquiring the tip-transfer function (TTF) from a Fourier transform approach. The calculated TTF is used to predict the MFM response from a permalloy nanostructure and compared to experimental results.