The accumulation of litter or thatch can affect plant community composition by affecting the temperature, nutrient availability, and light availability of the soil environment, thereby forming a potentially important linkage between recent productivity and current ecosystem processes. To investigate the importance of litter on a fen peatland plant community, we conducted a litter addition and r...

Transition metal diborides are ceramic materials with potential applications as hard protective thin films and electrical contact materials. We investigate the possibility to obtain age hardening through isostructural clustering, including spinodal decomposition, or ordering-induced precipitation in ternary diboride alloys. By means of first-principles mixing thermodynamics calculations, 45 ter...

We report on imaging living bacterial cells by using a correlated tapping-mode atomic force microscopy (AFM) and confocal fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM). For optimal imaging of Gram-negative Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 cells, we explored different methods of bacterial sample preparation, such as spreading the cells on poly-L-lysine coated surfaces or agarose gel coated surfaces....

A highly sensitive aptasensor for aflatoxin M₁ (AFM₁) detection was constructed based on fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) between 5-carboxyfluorescein (FAM) and palladium nanoparticles (PdNPs). PdNPs (33 nm) were synthesized through a seed-mediated growth method and exhibited broad and strong absorption in the whole ultraviolet-visible (UV-Vis) range. The strong coordination intera...

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...

The authors describe a method for athermalization in atomic force microscope (AFM) based force spectroscopy applications using microstructures that thermomechanically match the AFM probes. The method uses a setup where the AFM probe is coupled with the matched structure and the displacements of both structures are read out simultaneously. The matched structure displaces with the AFM probe as te...

High-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) is now materialized. It allows direct visualization of dynamic structural changes and dynamic processes of functioning biological molecules in physiological solutions, at high spatiotemporal resolution. Dynamic molecular events unselectively appear in detail in an AFM movie, facilitating our understanding of how biological molecules operate to functio...

A new approach in spintronics is based on spin-polarized charge transport phenomena governed by antiferromagnetic (AFM) materials. Recent studies have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach for AFM metals and semiconductors. We report tunneling anisotropic magnetoresistance (TAMR) due to the rotation of antiferromagnetic moments of an insulating CoO layer, incorporated into a tunnel junc...

Cantilevers fabricated by means of micromachining techniques are usually used for atomic force microscopy. In this paper, the spring constant of an atomic force microscope (AFM) cantilever is determined by using a large-scale cantilever. Since the spring constant of the large-scale cantilever is calibrated accurately, the spring constant of the AFM cantilever is determined precisely by measurin...

Contrast in the phase response of intermittent-contact atomic force microscopy (IC-AFM) reveals in-plane structural and mechanical properties of polymer monolayers. This result is unexpected, as IC-AFM has previously only been considered as a probe of out-of-plane properties. Until now, AFM measurements of nanoscale in-plane properties have employed contact mode techniques. In-plane property me...