Influence of the atmospheric humidity on the behaviour of silicon AFM probes in photon scanning tunneling microscopy

The photon scanning tunneling microscopy (PSTM) allows to characterize the surface topography with high resolution. This microscopy exploits the exponential decay of the evanescent field achieved by the total internal reflection under the surface sample. When the distance between the sensor and the surface becomes small (~ 100 nm), the non propagating photons of the evanescent field can be converted into guided propagating mode of polaritons. A bulk Silicon probe is used in the AFM experiment as a sensor of van der Waals forces. The aim of this paper is to discuss the influence of the atmospheric humidity on the PSTM measurements. We have showed that the theoretical predictions of the dielectrical capture model (DCM) are very different from the experimental results when the humidity level is higher than a threshold value (30%). We present the results obtained with TE polarization, but the same behaviour is found with TM polarization. Although, in this paper we do not propose a theoretical model explaining the deviations between DCM values and experimental, however we found a validity threshold for our experimental results and we have emited the assumption that under high humidity level the pollution film presents on the sample surface slide during the displacement of the probe