Intermodulation scanning force spectroscopy

摘要

A method of scanning a surface comprising the steps of oscillating a resonator with a sharp tip, the resonator being brought close to the surface to be scanned and excited with at least two excitation frequencies, characterized by the step of using a non-linear tip-surface interaction to to generate an intermodulation feedback of the resonator and to measure the intermodulation products in a feedback signal and thereby to obtain information about the surface, the waveform generation of the resonator being carried out by the excitation frequencies and the interrogation of the feedback signal with exactly integer multiples of the smallest common divisor of all excitation frequencies.