Direct Sensing of Time-varying Displacement in Nanopositioners by Piezoelectric Ceramics Transducers

We address characterization of piezoelectric (PZT) ceramics for direct measurement of stage displacement in piezo-driven nanopositioners. The sensor is compact and cheap, needs no signal conditioning electronics when operating within the sensing bandwidth, and follows time-varying large signal profile of stage displacement accurately. The proposed sensor has a 3 sigma-resolution of 1.9 nm and its accuracy by a constant scaling factor is less than 27 nm in the sensing bandwidth.