Lateral force calibration of an atomic force microscope with a diamagnetic levitation spring system

By Qunyang Li, K.-S. Kim, A. Rydberg. 2006

199 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A novel diamagnetic lateral force calibrator (D-LFC) has been developed to directly calibrate atomic force microscope (AFM) cantilever-tip or -bead assemblies. This enables an AFM to accurately measure the lateral forces encountered in friction or biomechanical-testing experiments at a small length scale. In the process of development, deformation characteristics of the AFM cantilever assemblies under frictional loading have been analyzed and four essential response variables, i.e., force constants, of the assembly have been identified. Calibration of the lateral force constant and the “crosstalk” lateral force constant, among the four, provides the capability of measuring absolute AFM lateral forces. The D-LFC is composed of four NdFeB magnets and a diamagnetic pyrolytic graphite sheet, which can calibrate the two constants with an accuracy on the order of 0.1%. Preparation of the D-LFC and the data processing required to get the force constants is significantly simpler than any other calibration methods...

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5ed5f8f482f4e3a5660fc5e7391ff442c2de8ae4