18 Jan 2010 There's over 40 application areas for the Kelvin Probe, including Surface Photovoltage measurements in Solar Cells, Nanotechnology, Metals, Semiconductors, Forensics, Polymer Electronics & Corrosion. Kelvin Probes address work function and surface potential measurements. A non-contact, non-destructive vibrating capacitor device it is used to measure the work function difference, or for non-metals, the surface potential, between a conducting specimen and a vibrating tip. The Kelvin Probe has undergone a dramatic renaissance in recent years, with highly improved resolution of the instrument while also ensuring that it can be used in a vacuum. New designs can map surface properties with resolution in the 50 nm range. The Kelvin Probe is a non-invasive technique, yet extremely sensitive to changes in the top-most atomic layers, such as those caused by deposition, absorption, corrosion and atomic displacement. In some cases it can detect less than one-thousandth of an absorbed layer. |
