Related Articles Design and performance of a combined secondary ion mass spectrometry-scanning probe microscopy instrument for high sensitivity and high-resolution elemental three-dimensional analysis Rev. Sci. Instrum. 83, 063702 (2012) High-speed Lissajous-scan atomic force microscopy: Scan pattern planning and control design issues Rev. Sci. Instrum. 83, 063701 (2012) High potential sensitiv...

A Si adatom on a Si(111)-(7 × 7) reconstructed surface is a typical atomic feature that can rather easily be imaged by a non-contact atomic force microscope (nc-AFM) and can be thus used to test the atomic resolution of the microscope. Based on our first principles density functional theory (DFT) calculations, we demonstrate that the structure of the termination of the AFM tip plays a decisive ...

The highlight of the past year is the unfolding and refolding of the muscle protein titin in the atomic force microscope. A related highlight in the intersection between experiment and theory is a recent review of the effects of molecular forces on biochemical kinetics. Other advances in scanning probe microscopy include entropic brushes, molecular sandwiches and applications of atomic force mi...

Over the past ten years the atomic force microscope has developed more and more into a spectroscopic tool rather than a simple microscope. Still, for most non-expert users corning from fields other than physics, such as biomedical scientists, dealing with the advanced spectroscopic AFM techniques beyond imaging is not so simple. This tutorial answers some how-to-do-it questions concerning the m...

The critical quantity in understanding imaging using an atomic force microscope is the force the sample exerts on the tip. We put forward a simple one-to-one force to water density relationship, explain exactly how it occurs, and in which circumstances it holds. We argue that two wide classes of atomic force microscope (AFM) tip should lead to at least qualitative agreement with our model and r...