Trade-offs in sensitivity and sampling depth in bimodal atomic force microscopy and comparison to the trimodal case

• Babak Eslami,
• Daniel Ebeling and
• Santiago D. Solares

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2014, 5, 1144–1151, doi:10.3762/bjnano.5.125

• ; multifrequency atomic force microscopy; indentation depth modulation; Nafion; open loop; proton exchange membranes; trimodal; Introduction Since its invention in the early 1980s [1], atomic force microscopy (AFM) has become one of the most widely used characterization tools in nanotechnology and a wide range of

• through changes in the amplitude of the highest driven eigenmode, which has the highest dynamic force constant (the higher stiffness of higher eigenmodes has also been advantageous in subsurface imaging applications in contact resonance AFM [18]). In this paper we show that indentation depth modulation

• ). Indentation depth modulation with bimodal AFM Figure 2d shows that the second eigenmode is much more effective in accomplishing additional indentation depth than the fundamental eigenmode for the same change in amplitude (note how a 10 nm increase in the second mode amplitude is significantly more effective