PACS. 82.20K-Potential energy surfaces for chemical reactions. PACS. 71.45N-Calculations of total electronic binding energy. PACS. 68.65-Layer structures, intercalation compolU1ds and superlattices: growth, structure and non-electronic properties. PACS. 61.16D-Electron microscopy determinations (inc. scanning tunnelling microscopy methods). Abstract.-We investigate the microscopic mechanism of ...

New experiments are discussed on measuring the Casimir force between metallic surfaces. One of them uses torsion pendulum and the other one | atomic force microscope. The claimed agreement of experimental data with a theory is analyzed. A 5% level of agreement obtained with a torsion pendulum is shown to be in contradiction with the values of surface roughness, nite conductivity and temperature...

The photonic force microscope (PFM) is an opto-mechanical technique that uses an optically trapped probe to measure forces in the range of pico to femto Newton. For a correct use of the PFM, the force field has to be homogeneous on the scale of the Brownian motion of the trapped probe. This condition implicates that the force field must be conservative, excluding the possibility of a rotational...

A method is presented that allows direct measurement of a wide range of spring constants of cantilevers using an indentation instrument with an integrated optical microscope. An uncertainty of less than 10% can be achieved for spring constants from 0.1 to 10(2) Nm. The technique makes it possible to measure the spring constant at any desired location on a cantilever of any shape, particularly a...

Models in which the gravitational and gauge interactions are unified at ∼ 1 TeV lead to the possibility that large extra dimensions would produce Yukawa-type corrections to the Newtonian gravitational law at small distances. In some models with n = 3 extra dimensions, deviations from Newto-nian gravity would occur at separations ∼ 5 nm, a distance scale accessible to an atomic force microscope ...

The atomic force microscope is an instrument that is widely used in fields such as biology, chemistry and medicine for imaging at the atomic level. In this work, we consider a specific mode of AFM usage, known as the dynamic mode where the AFM cantilever probe is forced sinusoidally. In the absence of interaction with the sample being imaged, the cantilever follows a predictable sinusoidal traj...

In order to probe nanostructures on a surface we present a microscope based on the quantum recurrence phenomena. A cloud of atoms bounces off an atomic mirror connected to a cantilever and exhibits quantum recurrences. The times at which the recurrences occur depend on the initial height of the bouncing atoms above the atomic mirror, and vary following the structures on the surface under invest...

The mixture of EDTA-soluble proteins found in abalone nacre are known to cause the nucleation and growth of aragonite on calcite seed crystals in supersaturated solutions of calcium carbonate. Past atomic force microscope studies of the interaction of these proteins with calcite crystals did not observe this transition because no information about the crystal polymorph on the surface was obtain...