Since its invention in 1986 by G. Binnig and C.F. Quate (Binnig), the atomic force microscope (or AFM) has become an essential tool for the characterization of materials, especially in the field of nanotechnology. This is due to the technique's resolution, surface sensitivity, versatility with respect to sample characteristics, its ability to be used in multiple working environments as well as ...

In this thesis, two inversion-based feedforward control approaches have been developed and implemented to high-speed large-range atomic force microscope (AFM) imaging and nanofabrication, respectively. High-speed large-range AFM imaging and nanofabrication are needed in many areas and have attracted great interests. Challenges, however, must be overcome because in high-speed largerange AFM oper...

In this study, we present a new technique for the structural analysis of the collagen compound in historic tissues. We therefore used atomic force microscopy (AFM), a new high resolution technique which offers significant information on the fibrillar assembly and ultrastructure of collagen fibrils, which may provide insight into both the physiological and eventually pathogenic pattern of collag...

On- and off-frequency compression at the 4000- and 8000-Hz cochlear places were estimated using a new version of the additivity of forward masking (AFM) technique, that measures the effects of combining two non-overlapping forward maskers. Instead of measuring signal thresholds to estimate compression of the signal as in the original AFM technique, the decrease in masker threshold in the combin...

We have developed a tool for performing surgical operations on living cells at nanoscale resolution using atomic force microscopy (AFM) and a modified AFM tip. The AFM tips are sharpened to ultrathin needles of 200-300 nm in diameter using focused ion beam etching. Force-distance curves obtained by AFM using the needles indicated that the needles penetrated the cell membrane following indentati...

Scanning probe microscopy (SPM) has been in use for 30 years, and the form of SPM known as atomic force microscopy (AFM) has been around for 25 of those years. AFM has been used to produce high resolution images of a variety of samples ranging from DNA to carbon nanotubes. Type I collagen and many collagen-based tissues (including dentin, tendon, cartilage, skin, fascia, vocal cords, and cornea...

A technique has been developed for reliably resolving the GPS carrier phase ambiguity over a medium length baseline. A combination between three methods of optimization, global random search and ambiguity function mapping produced an efficient search algorithm what the author called the Pseudo Randomized Search Strategy (PRSS). The PRSS is a adaptive search technique that can learned high perfo...

Biological processes such as endocytosis/exocytosis, interactions between cells and the dynamic reorganization of the cytosqueleton are between the topics extensively studied using the Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) technique. The topographical structure of the cell membrane itself is complex, rich in natural corrugations and ridges. These surface characteristics obscure the identification of ex...

The Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) is a very important instrument for use in nanotechnology and biology since it can be used to measure a wide variety of objects, such as nano-particles and cells, either in air or liquid. However, the images that are measured using AFM are distorted because of the influence of the tip geometry and the dynamic response of the instrument. This influence means that...

Since its invention in 1986, the atomic force microscope (AFM) has become one of the most widely used near-field microscopes. Surfaces of hard samples are imaged routinely with atomic resolution. Soft biological samples, however, are still challenging. In this brief review, the AFM technique is introduced to the experimental biologist. We discuss recent data on imaging molecular structures of b...