Detecting confined fluid behavior by SFA: Past, present, and future

摘要

Since Israelachvili and co-workers in 1970s first developed apparatuses to detect van der Waals forces of molecularly smooth mica surfaces confined down to 1.5 nm, these advanced surface techniques have been vastly explored and extended to detect a variety of intermolecular forces in fluids and biomolecular systems [1]. The Surface Forces Apparatus(SFA) is one representative, which has been widely applied in the cutting-edge fields. The most fascinating advantage of SFA is on its capability to detect the force at atomic level。