The mechanisms underlying the enhanced resolution of atomic force microscopy with functionalized tips

By Nikolaj Moll, L. Gross, Fabian Mohn, Alessandro Curioni, G. Meyer. 2010

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

By functionalizing the tip of an atomic force microscope (AFM) with a molecule or an atom that significantly contributes to the tip–sample interaction, the resolution can be dramatically enhanced. The interaction and therefore the resolution crucially depend on the chemical nature of the tip termination. Employing a tip functionalized with a CO molecule, atomic resolution of a pentacene molecule was recently demonstrated. In this work, the interaction between the CO tip and the pentacene imaged are studied with first principles calculations. The calculated frequency shifts compare very well with the experiment. The different energy contributions are analyzed and the Pauli energy is computed. We demonstrate that the source of the high resolution is Pauli repulsion, whereas van der Waals and electrostatic interactions only add a diffuse attractive background.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Structural Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c37369331a0390acc7e32814dd7935f0b9127d1c