Paper EW-WeL5
Faster, Higher Resolution and More Accurate Imaging with the Cypher™ Atomic Force Microscope

Wednesday, November 2, 2011, 1:20 pm, Room West Exhibit Hall

Within four years of the invention of the AFM, micro-fabricated cantilevers with integrated tips appeared, saving early practitioners from the joys of hand-assembling their cantilevers. However, even though many researchers soon understood the benefits of further miniaturization of the lever, standard commercial levers remained at the same 100 to 300 µm size for nearly the next two decades, in part because making a commercial instrument capable of using much smaller levers presented significant technical challenges.

Within the past few years, commercial instruments like the Cypher AFM, from Asylum Research, have appeared which are capable of using cantilevers as small as 10 µm in length and with resonance frequencies 5 MHz and higher and those levers are now readily available. Small levers bring two major benefits to AFM. The first is much smaller thermal noise, enabling quieter force measurements and higher resolution imaging with Angstrom-scale cantilever amplitudes. The second is a major speed boost for AC modes (tapping, non-contact) in both air and liquid. When coupled with other instrumental improvements such as a high-speed scanner, the shorter levers allow scanning with good tracking at rates 20X to 40X what was possible with conventional levers. I will talk about the technical details behind both these improvements. I will also present images and movies highlighting the improvements, including images showing individual vacancy defects on crystals and movies showing fast scanning on polymers, crystals, and biological samples.