Nonlinear dynamical properties of an oscillating tip-cantilever system in the tapping mode

Abstract

The dynamical properties of an oscillating tip-cantilever system are now widely used in the field of scanning force microscopy. The aim of the present work is to get analytical expressions describing the nonlinear dynamical properties of the oscillator in noncontact and intermittent contact situations in the tapping mode. Three situations are investigated: the pure attractive interaction, the pure repulsive interaction, and a mixing of the two. The analytical solutions obtained allow general trends to be extracted: the noncontact and the intermittent contact show a very discriminate variation of the phase. Therefore the measurement of the phase becomes a simple way to identify whether or not the tip touches the surface during the oscillating period. It is also found that the key parameter governing the structure of the dynamical properties is the product of the quality factor by a reduced stiffness. In the attractive regime, the reduced stiffness is the ratio of an attractive effective stiffness and the cantilever one. In the repulsive regime, the reduced stiffness is the ratio between the contact stiffness and the cantilever one. The quality factor plays an important role. For large values of the quality factor; it is predicted that a pure topography can be obtained whatever the value of the contact stiffness. For a smaller quality factor, the oscillator becomes more sensitive to change of the local mechanical properties. As a direct consequence, varying the quality factor, for example with a vacuum chamber, would be a very interesting way to investigate soft materials either to access topographic information or nanomechanical properties.

References in corpus (3)

• Nonlinear Dynamic Behavior of an Oscillating Tip-Microlever System and Contrast at the Atomic Scale
• Growth kinetics of a nanoprotuberance under the action of an oscillating nanotip
• Relationship between the non linear dynamic behaviour of an oscillating tip-microlever system and the contrast at the atomic scale

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• Dissipation induced by attractive interaction in dynamic force microscopy : contribution of adsorbed water layers
• Anisotropic super-attenuation of capillary waves on driven glass interfaces
• Distance dependence of force and dissipation in non-contact atomic force microscopy on Cu(100) and Al(111)
• Stability of an oscillating tip in Non-Contact Atomic Force Microscopy: theoretical and numerical investigations
• Steady-state and transient behavior in dynamic atomic force microscopy
• Stability analysis of an oscillating tip-cantilever system in NC-AFM
• Calibration of oscillation amplitude in Dynamic Scanning Force Microscopy