Carbon nanotube tips are explored in fabricating oxide nanostructures
on silicon surfaces with an atomic force microscope, Nanotubes can wri
te nanostructures at speeds up to 0.5 mm/s over large surface areas, a
nd present a solution to the long-standing tip-wear problem. Experimen
tal and theoretical work find that nanotube tips are impervious to hig
h compressive and lateral forces and breakdown in high electric fields
, A ''cleaving'' method is developed to reproducibly obtain dome-close
d multi-walled nanotube tips with suitable length. Nanotube materials
could become key elements for future miniaturization applications, (C)
1998 American Institute of Physics.