The Role of Nonlinear Dynamics in Quantitative Atomic Force Microscopy

Abstract

Various methods of force measurement with the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) are compared for their ability to accurately determine the tip-surface force from analysis of the nonlinear cantilever motion. It is explained how intermodulation, or the frequency mixing of multiple drive tones by the nonlinear tip-surface force, can be used to concentrate the nonlinear motion in a narrow band of frequency near the cantilevers fundamental resonance, where accuracy and sensitivity of force measurement are greatest. Two different methods for reconstructing tip-surface forces from intermodulation spectra are explained. The reconstruction of both conservative and dissipative tip-surface interactions from intermodulation spectra are demonstrated on simulated data.

25 pages (preprint, double space) 7 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Advances in atomic force microscopy
• The Band Excitation Method in Scanning Probe Microscopy for Rapid Mapping of Energy Dissipation on the Nanoscale
• Reconstructing nonlinearities with intermodulation spectroscopy
• The Intermodulation Lockin Analyzer

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Interaction imaging with amplitude-dependence force spectroscopy
• Imaging high-speed friction at the nanometer scale
• Reconstruction of Tip-Surface Interactions with Multimodal Intermodulation Atomic Force Microscopy
• Interpreting motion and force for narrow-band intermodulation atomic force microscopy
• On modeling and measuring viscoelasticity with dynamic Atomic Force Microscopy
• Steady-state and transient behavior in dynamic atomic force microscopy