Interaction imaging with amplitude-dependence force spectroscopy

Abstract

Knowledge of surface forces is the key to understanding a large number of processes in fields ranging from physics to material science and biology. The most common method to study surfaces is dynamic atomic force microscopy (AFM). Dynamic AFM has been enormously successful in imaging surface topography, even to atomic resolution, but the force between the AFM tip and the surface remains unknown during imaging. Here, we present a new approach that combines high accuracy force measurements and high resolution scanning. The method, called amplitude-dependence force spectroscopy (ADFS) is based on the amplitude-dependence of the cantilever's response near resonance and allows for separate determination of both conservative and dissipative tip-surface interactions. We use ADFS to quantitatively study and map the nano-mechanical interaction between the AFM tip and heterogeneous polymer surfaces. ADFS is compatible with commercial atomic force microscopes and we anticipate its wide-spread use in taking AFM toward quantitative microscopy.

References in corpus (4)

• An Atomic-resolution nanomechanical mass sensor
• The Band Excitation Method in Scanning Probe Microscopy for Rapid Mapping of Energy Dissipation on the Nanoscale
• The Intermodulation Lockin Analyzer
• The Role of Nonlinear Dynamics in Quantitative Atomic Force Microscopy

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Imaging high-speed friction at the nanometer scale
• Reconstruction of Tip-Surface Interactions with Multimodal Intermodulation Atomic Force Microscopy
• Determining surface properties with bimodal and multimodal AFM
• On modeling and measuring viscoelasticity with dynamic Atomic Force Microscopy
• Friction as Contrast Mechanism in Heterodyne Force Microscopy
• Background force compensation in dynamic atomic force microscopy
• Quantitative Formulation of Frequency-Dependent Average Force in AM-AFM
• Confronting Interatomic Force Measurements
• Simultaneous quantitative imaging of surface and magnetic forces
• Nonlinear Atomic Force Microscopy: Squeezing and Skewness of Micro-Mechanical Oscillators interacting with a Surface