This review focuses upon the measurement of force, indentation, and deformation with the atomic force microscope (AFM). Measurement and theory for elastic and viscoelastic particles and substrates are covered, as well as for deformable fluid drops and bubbles. A brief review is given of papers that use tapping mode imaging, normal and lateral force modulation, noise spectra, and indentation mea...

Interaction force-distance profiles between substrate-supported membranes composed of equimolar ternary mixtures of unsaturated phosphotidylcholine (PC) lipid, saturated PC lipid, and cholesterol were determined using the surface force apparatus. Both double and single unsaturated PC lipids were studied. In all cases, the membranes were slightly negatively charged, resulting in a weak, long-ran...

A simple modified Poisson-Boltzmann formalism, which accounts also for those interactions between electrolyte ions and colloidal particles not included in the mean potential, is used to calculate the force between two parallel plates. It is shown that the short-range interactions between ions and plates, such as those due to the change in the hydration free energy of a structure-making/breaking...

We consider the effect of atomic hydrogen exposure to a system of two undoped sheets of graphene grown near a silica surface (the first adsorbed to the surface and the second freestanding near the surface). In the absence of atomic hydrogen the van der Waals force between the sheets is attractive at all separations causing the sheets to come closer together. However, with addition of atomic hyd...

During microscale object manipulation, contact (pull-off) forces and non-contact (capillary, van der Waals, and electrostatic) forces determine the behaviour of the micro-objects rather than the inertial forces. The aim of this article is to give an experimental analysis of the physical phenomena at a microscopic scale in dry and liquid media. This article introduces a review of the major diffe...

A system of three electrolytes separated by two parallel planes is considered. Each region is described by a dielectric constant and a Coulomb fluid in the Debye-Hückel regime. In their book Dispersion Forces, Mahanty and Ninham have given the van der Waals free energy of this system. We rederive this free energy by a different method, using linear response theory and the electrostatic Maxwell ...

To investigate globular protein–protein and protein–salt interactions in electrolyte solutions, a potential of mean force including hard-core repulsion, van der Waals attraction and electric double layer repulsion is proposed in this work. Both van der Waals attraction and double-layer repulsion are represented using hard spheres with two-Yukawa tails. The explicit analytical solution of osmoti...

Quantum reflection of an atomic wave from a solid surface is caused by the attractive van der Waals force acting on the atom near the surface. The researchers had previously verified the quantum reflection of a cold neon atomic beam from a silicon surface. In this research they demonstrate the first known reflective atom-optical elements that use natural interaction of a solid surface, or attra...

This study focuses on hexagonal boron nitride as an ultra-thin van der Waals dielectric substrate for the epitaxial growth of highly ordered crystalline networks of the organic semiconductor parahexaphenyl. Atomic force microscopy based morphology analysis combined with density functional theory simulations reveal their epitaxial relation. As a consequence, needle-like crystallites of parahexap...

In order to confirm the strong Van der Waals force in the nucleon-nucleon interaction, it is proposed to measure precisely the angular distribution of the cross section of the low energy (Tlab = 20 ∼ 30MeV.) proton-proton scattering. By using the spectrum of the long range interaction obtained from the analysis of the phase shift data of the S-wave of the p-p scattering, a characteristic interf...