Introduction atomic force microscopy

Since the early 1980s, the number of variants to the above that have been developed are manifold and, therefore, only a brief introduction to the technique is possible here. To exploit the potential of STM fully, the sample needs to be both flat and conducting, and hence it is not widely used for the study of polymers. However, a variant of the technique has become very widely used—atomic force microscopy (AFM). In many ways, AFM is derived from surface proliloinelry. in which a stylus is scanned across the... 

The recent technique of micro-thermal analysis ()U-TA), which now has a variety of measurement modes, is included here because usually two or more measurements are made simultaneously. Micro-TA combines the imaging capabilities of atomic force microscopy (AFM) with a form of localised thermal analysis, and is able to measure thermal transitions on an area of a few microns. A good introduction to the whole family of these methods is available on the internet, from which application studies can... 

Upon introduction in vivo, the interface between the delivery system and the biological tissue and/or fluid is critically important to the in vivo performance [5]. Accordingly, surface properties including surface chemical composition and surface area must be well characterized. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) is a widely used technique to obtain surface elemental composition, and Branauer, Emmett, and Teller (BET) measurement is used to provide information on surface area. Surface morphology is typically assessed via light, electron, and atomic force microscopy (AFM). The amorphous and crystalline nature of materials can be determined from X-ray diffraction (XRD) and density measurements. 

V. Koutsos, Atomic force microscopy and pol5oners on surfaces. In Atomic Force Microscopy in Process Engineering An introduction to AFM for Improved Processes and Products, ed. by W. Richard Bowen, N. Hilal (Elsevier, Netherlands, 2009), pp. 225-244... 

West P, Introduction to atomic force microscopy theory, practice and applications — www. AFMUniversity.org... 

Hou at al. [24] reported the synthesis of poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) nanobrushes on silicon based on localized surface-initiated polymerization. To achieve this, self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of octadecyltrichlorosi-lane (OTS) were first generated on a silicon surface. Introduction of nanostructures was achieved on these SAM surfaces using a conductive atomic force microscopy (AFM) tip, which led to the oxidation of OTS SAMs. These... 

Due to such advantages as high resolution that can approach the real atomic and molecular scale, and the ability to perform real-time measurement that cannot be matched by traditional microscopy, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) have attracted considerable attention since their introduction from researchers in various fields. The operational procedure of these microscopes is to position an atomically sharp detector needle to less than several nanometers from the surface of a sample, probe the interaction between the detector needle and the sample, scan the sample surface two-dimensionally, and obtain the surface image (an unprecedented method). If the interaction that is probed is the tunneling of the electron that is well known in quantum mechanics, the technique is called STM (T indicates tunneling). If, on the other hand, atomic force (van der Waals force) is used, it is called AFM. 

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