Paper SP+AS+MI+NS+SS-TuA11
Breaking the Time Barrier in Scanning Probe Force Microscopy: Fast Free Force Reconstruction (F³R) for Non-contact SPM

Tuesday, October 31, 2017, 5:40 pm, Room 10

In the past 3 decades since its invention, the atomic force microscope (AFM) has offered unparalleled insight into both nanoscale structure and surface functionality. At the same time, the spatial resolution afforded by AFM tip is counterpoised by the slow detection speeds compared to other common microscopy techniques (e.g. optical, scanning electron microscopy etc.). This ultimately limits AFM and related measurements to static or quasi-static processes.

In this presentation, we outline a novel time resolved AFM imaging approach, referred to as Fast free force recovery (F³R)[1] utilizing big data capture and analytics. F³R-AFM is based on the G-mode acquisition platform [2] and allows direct reconstruction of the tip-sample forces with much higher time resolution (~µs) than possible using standard AFM detection methods (~ms). We describe how fast data acquisition, coupled with multivariate statistical denoising methods can be harnessed to overcome the widely viewed temporal bottleneck in AFM, the mechanical bandwidth of the cantilever. Finally, we will demonstrate quantitative recovery of tip-sample forces with <10 µs time resolution, free from influences of the cantilever ring-down as well as discussing the fundamentally time and information limits of the approach.

[1] Collins, Liam, Mahshid Ahmadi, Ting Wu, Bin Hu, Sergei V. Kalinin, and Stephen Jesse. "Breaking the Time Barrier in Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy: Fast Free Force Reconstruction Using the G-Mode Platform." ACS nano (2017).

[2] Belianinov, Alexei, Sergei V. Kalinin, and Stephen Jesse. "Complete information acquisition in dynamic force microscopy." Nature communications 6 (2015).