We are fabricating radio-frequency silicon nitride cantilevers for the use in scanning probe microscopy. These cantilevers will be used to study dielectric fluctuations above thin polymers films and charging behavior in organic field-effect transistors. Further, we have fabricated doublyclamped cantilevers of similar dimension and constituency and employed a magnetomotive scheme to measure thei...

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) was used to assess the indentation modulus Ms and pull-off force Fpo in four case studies of distinct evidence types, namely hair, questioned documents, fingerprints, and explosive particle-surface interactions. In the hair study, Ms decreased and Fpo increased after adding conditioner and bleach to the hair. For the questioned documents, Ms and Fpo of two inks wer...

Integrated sensors are essential for scanning probe microscopy (SPM) based systems that employ arrays of microcantilevers for high throughput. Common integrated sensors, such as piezoresistive, piezoelectric, capacitive and thermoelectric sensors, suffer from low bandwidth and/or low resolution. In this paper, a novel magnetoresistive-sensor-based scanning probe microscopy (MR-SPM) technique is...

It has been shown that electron transitions, as measured in a scanning tunnelling microscope, are related to chemical interactions in a tunnelling barrier. Here, we show that the shape and apparent height of subatomic features in both, measurements of the attractive forces in an atomic force microscope, and measurements of the tunneling current between the Si(111) surface and an oscillating can...

ABSTRACT We present a novel system for large-area scanning probe microscopy (SPM) measurements based on minimum counter-force linear guidance mechanisms, voice coils, interferometers and fuzzy logic-based feedback loop electronics. It is shown that voice coil-based actuation combined with interferometry can be a good alternative to piezoceramic positioning systems, providing fast and still suff...

We introduce a general approach for inherently suppressing out-of-plane disturbances in scanning probe microscopy that enables higher-resolution imaging, particularly in noisy environments. In this approach, two distinct sensors simultaneously measure the probe–sample separation. One sensor measures a spatial average over a large sample area while the other responds locally to topography undern...

We propose a mode of dynamic scanning probe microscopy based on parametric resonance for highly sensitive nanoscale imaging and force spectroscopy. In this mode the microcantilever probe is excited by means of a closed-loop electronic circuit that modulates the microcantilever stiffness at a frequency close to twice its natural resonance frequency. Under ambient conditions this parametric pumpi...