The choice on which type of cantilever to use for Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) depends on the type of the experiment being done. Typically, the cantilever has to be exchanged when a different stiffness is required and the entire alignment has to be repeated. In the present work, a method to adjust the stiffness in situ of a commercial AFM cantilever is developed. The adjustment is achieved by ...

In this research, the elastic behaviour of two Co thin films simultaneously deposited in an off-normal angle method was studied. Towards this end, two Si micro-cantilevers were simultaneously coated using pulsed laser deposition at an oblique angle, creating a Co nano-string surface morphology with a predetermined orientation. The selected position of each micro-cantilever during the coating pr...

The sensitivity analysis of atomic force microscope (AFM) based manipulation of gold spherical nanoparticles in air medium has been carried out in previous research works. In the AFM-based manipulations conducted in various biological liquid mediums, the new environmental parameters associated with these biological fluids also affect the dynamics of the manipulation process. Therefore in this r...

Active Q control may be used to modify the effective quality (Q) factor of an atomic force microscope (AFM) micro-cantilever when operating in tapping mode. The control system uses velocity feedback to obtain an effective cantilever Q factor to achieve optimal scan speed and image resolution for the imaging environment and sample type. Time delay of the cantilever displacement signal is the mos...

An interferometric method is implemented in order to accurately assess the thermal fluctuations of a micro-cantilever sensor in liquid environments. The power spectrum density (PSD) of thermal fluctuations together with Sader's model of the cantilever allow for the indirect measurement of the liquid viscosity with good accuracy. The good quality of the deflection signal and the characteristic l...

A method for identifying a piecewise-linear approximation to the nonlinear forces acting on a system is presented and demonstrated using response data from a micro cantilever beam. It is based on the Restoring Force Surface (RFS) method by Masri and Caughey, which is very attractive when initially testing a nonlinear system because it does not require the user to postulate a form for the nonlin...