Magnetic Force Microscopy: Basic Principles and Applications

MFM was introduced shortly after the invention of the AFM (Martin & Wickramasinghe, 1987), and became popular as a technique that offers high imaging resolution without the need for special sample preparation or environmental conditions. Since the early 1990s, it has been widely used in the fundamental research of magnetic materials, as well as the development of magnetic recording components. MFM detects the quantity that is of particular interest for the magnetic recording process, namely the magnetic stray field produced by a magnetized medium or by a write head. The magnetic transition geometry and stray field configuration in longitudinal recording media is illustrated in Fig. 1 (Rugar et al., 1990). Nowadays, the main developments in MFM are focused on the quantitative analysis of data, improvement of resolution, and the application of external fields during measurements (Schwarz & Wiesendanger, 2008).