Investigation the structured material surfaces using the quartz tuning fork based on an atomic force microscopy with controllable q-factor in two modes operation: “intermittent contact” and “shear-force”

摘要

We present a combination of an atomic force microscopy with a quartz-crystal tuning fork in ambient conditions. A silicon cantilever tip was attached to one prong of the tuning fork to realize shear-force and intermittent contact mode Fork-AFM operation. By electronically adjusting the quality factor of the probe, called Q-control, it was possible to tune the quality factor Q and correspondingly change the overall scanning time. It was also seen that tuning fork with low quality factors could increase stability with the changed signal and so improve the imaging resolution. Measurements on the different samples were used to demonstrate this technique.