Advisors

Scanning probe microscopes (SPM) have been used to explore many interesting physical prop-erties of matter. Of these, the Scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and the atomic force microscope (AFM) are well-known, and today there is a large variety of SPMs, each being able to measure locally a unique property of matter, such as compressibility, magnetic force, spectra, etc. An SPM based on a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) was first built by Rogers and Bermon in the early 1980s. This kind of microscope combines the superb magnetic field sensitivity a SQUID can offer with finely-tuned spatial resolution a scanning system possesses. The SQUIDs used in these microscopes are normally fabricated in a clean-room process on a planar substrate. In this work we explored the possibility of fabricating a SQUID on the edge of a submicron conical tip. The advantage of using a tip instead of a planar substrate as a probe is that one can approach the surface of a sample more accurately and the ease of making SQUIDs which are typically much smaller than standard planar ones. As a first step we made Al/Al2O3/A