Elastic Properties of Suspended Conducting GaAs/AlGaAs Nanostructures by Means of Atomic Force Microscopy

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the applicability of nanoindentation technique using atomic-force microscope cantilever for studying the elastic properties of suspended semiconductor structures on the basis of relatively thick GaAs/AlGaAs membranes in the case when their stiffness significantly exceeds that of the cantilever of atomic-force microscope, which is confirmed by the agreement between the experimentally determined values of both relative and absolute stiffness measured at different points of the investigated structure with theoretical predictions.