Pushing the Envelope in Atomic Force Microscopy

Extract

Over the past decade, Atomic Force/Scanning Probe Microscopy (AFM/SPM) has emerged as the leading tool for investigations at the nanoscale – doing everything from imaging, to compositional differentiation, to explorations of molecular forces. However, aside from some interesting tweaks, add-ons and repackaging, the field has seen no fundamentally new instruments for several years. For the extremely high-resolution AFM/SPMs, there has literally been no completely new microscope for well over a decade. We report here on the new CypherTM AFM from Asylum Research (Figure 1). that delivers upgrades from the existing field of older AFM/SPMs on a variety of levels.