Compensation of the magnetic force imaging by scanning directions

It  was  found  that  the  results  of  magnetic  force  microscope  (MFM)  imaging  were different with the probe scanning directions, and the images were often distorted. This paper studied the effect of scanning directions on the MFM imaging, and a method for the  distortion  compensation  was  proposed  to  reduce  the  errors.  In  the  study,  three different scanning directions with the angles of 0°, 45°  and 90°, were used to measure the  magnetic  force  distribution  of  a  magnetic  sample  with  a  regular  structure.  The theoretical and experimental results have shown that the scanning direction parallel to the  magnetic  structure  will  cause  a  minimum  phase  shift  difference  and  lead  to  a structure distortion. With the proposed compensation method, the distortion structures were  corrected  and  the  effect  of  scanning  directions  on  the  MFM  imaging  was significantly  reduced.  This  work  provides  a  way  to  obtain  the  correct  images  of magnetic  structures  using  an  MFM  and  to  improve  the  imaging  quality  in  a  wide range of MFM applications.