Design and testing of an Ultra High Vacuum Microtribometer

In this paper, we present the design of a novel microtribometer operating in ultrahigh vacuum. The force sensor of the tribometer is based on the double leaf cantilever design. To remove noise and mechanical deformation due to temperature oscillation from measured signals, we employ a double laser interferometer and a passive noise reduction system. Depending on the spring constant of the cantilever used, the detection limit of lateral force measurements ranges from a few micronewtons to 1 mN. The tribometer chamber is equipped with an e-beam evaporator for deposition of metallic thin layers. The instrument is also connected to an X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy system. In the remainder of this paper, we present an experiment conducted on thin silver films that involves all of the components mentioned above.