Quantitative determination of effective dipole and monopole moments of magnetic force microscopy tips

We present experimental results on the characterization of commercially available magnetic force microscopy (MFM) thin film tips as a function of an external magnetic field. Well defined magnetic stray fields are produced using current carrying rings with radii ranging between 603 and 2369 nm fabricated by electron-beam lithography directly imaged by MFM. Treating the MFM tip as a point probe, the analysis of the image contrast as a function of both the magnetic stray field and the lift height allows for a quantitative determination of effective magnetic dipole and monopole moments of the tip as well as their imaginary location within the real physical tip. Our systematic study gives a quantitative relationship on how absolute values of the magnetic dipole and monopole moments and their location within the tip depend on a characteristic decay length of the z component of the magnetic field being detected. From this we can estimate the effective tip volume of the real physical thin film tip relevant in MFM imaging. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0021-8979(99)08518-7].