Advanced atomic force microscopy techniques II

Surface science and nanotechnology are inherently coupled because of the increased surface-to-volume ratio at the nanometer scale. Most of the exciting and astonishing properties of nanoscale materials are related to certain surface reconstructions and nanoscale geometries. New functionality is achieved by combinations of nanoscale materials or by structuring their surfaces. The unrivaled tools for measurements of all kind of nanoscale properties are scanning probe microscopy (SPM) techniques, which were triggered by the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in 1982 [1-3] and of the atomic force microscope (AFM) in 1986 [4]. These tools opened a huge field of nanoscale studies, from metal surfaces and clusters, molecular structures, insulators to liquid and electrochemical environments and even allowed the integration of various SPM techniques into biological and chemical experiments.