Study of assembling ZnO nanowires on AFM tips

The study of nanomaterial characteristics and its construction is important to the design of nanodevices. In this paper, we present assembling ZnO nanowires on atomic force microscope (AFM) probes for the first time for AFM imaging. It was found that different catalyzing conditions might influence the quality of the nanowires grown on the tips. Controlled imaging experiments with the ZnO nanowires probe and with the normal AFM probe have been carried out. In-situ imaging experiment confirmed that AFM imaging can be got by using the ZnO nanowires on the tips and the image quality would be affected by the quality of the ZnO nanowires on the AFM probes, grown under different conditions. The problems existing in in-situ imaging, such as tip expansion, the reflection of laser signal and the multi-tips phenomenon, are also discussed