Establishment of basic process to fabricate full GaAs cantilever for scanning probe microscope applications

Recently, several researchers have reported fabrications of cantilever based on various GaAs related bulk and heterostructure materials. But the details of fabrication processes and of mechanical properties have not yet been reported so far. In this work, we report fabrication and estimation of full GaAs cantilever for use of scanning probe microscopy (SPM). The process was accomplished only by photo-lithography and two-kind wet chemical etching. As a result, almost one-third of the samples had a perfect appearance as designed. For those samples, we made resonance frequency measurement by using laser vibrometer and found a good agreement with the calculation. We also tried atomic force microscopy (AFM) observations by using this cantilever and obtained equal images to those by commercial Si cantilever.