Probes for magnetic force microscopy imaging of soft magnetic samples

Magnetic force imaging of soft magnetic materials is often a challenge due to perturbing effects of the probe's stray field on the magnetic structure of the sample if the probe and the sample are too close. Especially with on e commonly employed imaging mode, the lift mode, which is used in some comm ercial instruments, this problem is very severe, since very small tip-sampl e distances frequently occur during the imaging of the sample topography. I n this study the effect is demonstrated by the imaging of arrays of micro-s tructured Permalloy films. It is shown that perturbations can be diminished by depositing a mechanical spacer on top of the probe's magnetic layer, wh ich ensures that a minimum distance between the magnetic part of the probe and the sample is always kept.