Extraction of the Mechanical Surface in Measurement of Nano Structures

The basic problem of measuring real surfaces with a tactile probe is the distortion of the measured profile due to the tip geometry in comparison with the real profile. The bigger the ratio of the characteristic dimension of the tip and the shortest describing wavelength of the surface, the larger the relative distortion will be. That must especially be taken into account in the case of the measurement of nano structures. To reverse this distortion a morphological operation for the reconstruction of the mechanical surface is investigated. The results demonstrate the efficiency and the limits of the reconstruction to obtain the mechanical surface, which also depends on the morphological extraction theorem.