Search results for " Atomic Force"
showing 10 items of 172 documents
Measuring (biological) materials mechanics with atomic force microscopy. 2. Influence of the loading rate and applied force (colloidal particles)
2020
Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is the most often used tool to study the mechanical properties of eukaryotic cells. Due to their complex assembly, cells show viscoelastic properties. When performing experiments, one has to consider the influence of both loading rate and maximum load on the measured mechanical properties. Here, we employed colloidal particles of various sizes (from 2 to 20 μm diameter) to perform force spectroscopy measurements on endothelial cells at loading rates varying from 0.1 to 50 μm/s, and maximum loads ranging from 1 to 25 nN. We were able to determine the non-linear dependence of cell viscoelastic properties on the loading rate which followed a weak power law. In add…
Scanning probe microscopies applied to the study of the domain wall in a ferroelectric crystal.
2007
Summary Scanning near-field optical microscopy is capable of measuring the topography and optical signals at the same time. This fact makes this technique a valuable tool in the study of materials at nanometric scale and, in particular, of ferroelectric materials, as it permits the study of their domains structure without the need of chemical etching and, therefore, not damaging the surface (as will be demonstrated later). We have measured the scanning near-field optical microscopy transmission, as well as the topography, of an RbTiOPO4 single crystalline slab, which exhibits two different of macroscopic ferroelectric domains. A chemical selective etching has been performed to distinguish b…
Current injection from metal to MoS2 probed at nanoscale by conductive atomic force microscopy
2016
Contacts with MoS2 are currently the object of many investigations, since current injection through metal/MoS2 interfaces represents one of the limiting factors to the performance of MoS2 thin film transistors. In this paper, we employed conductive atomic force microscopy (CAFM) to investigate the current injection mechanisms from a nanometric contact (a Pt coated tip) to the surface of MoS2 thin films exfoliated on SiO2. The analysis of local current-voltage (I-V) characteristics on a large array of tip positions provided high spatial resolution information on the lateral homogeneity of the tip/MoS2 Schottky barrier Phi(B) and of the ideality factor n. From the histograms of the measured P…
Self-Organization Pathways and Spatial Heterogeneity in Insulin Amyloid Fibril Formation
2009
At high temperature and low pH, the protein hormone insulin is highly prone to form amyloid fibrils, and for this reason it is widely used as a model system to study fibril formation mechanisms. In this work, we focused on insulin aggregation mechanisms occurring in HCl solutions (pH 1.6) at 60 degrees C. By means of in situ Thioflavin T (ThT) staining, the kinetics profiles were characterized as a function of the protein concentration, and two concurrent aggregation pathways were pointed out, being concentration dependent. In correspondence to these pathways, different morphologies of self-assembled protein molecules were detected by atomic force microscopy images also evidencing the prese…
Affinity scale between a carrier and a drug in DPI studied by atomic force microscopy.
2002
The dry powder inhalers (DPIs) consist, in the most cases, of ordered mixture where the particles adhesion results of interactions between the drug and the carrier. Generally, one step of production process is the micronization of the drug particles in order to reduce the size for ordered mixing optimization. But this operation is known to partially create an amorphous surface. In this case, surrounding storage conditions, like relative humidity (RH), are able to modify the percentage of amorphous drug surface. The aim of this study was to investigate surface reactivity, surface energy and direct force measurements by atomic force microscopy (AFM) between lactose (carrier) and zanamivir (dr…
Force interactions and adhesion of gold contacts using a combined atomic force microscope and transmission electron microscope
2002
Force interactions and adhesion of gold contacts using a combined atomic force microscope and transmission electron microscope
Correlative atomic force and confocal fluorescence microscopy: single molecule imaging and force induced spectral shifts (Conference Presentation)
2016
A grand challenge in nanoscience is to correlate structure or morphology of individual nano-sized objects with their photo-physical properties. An early example have been measurements of the emission spectra and polarization of single semiconductor quantum dots as well as their crystallographic structure by a combination of confocal fluorescence microscopy and transmission electron microscopy.[1] Recently, the simultaneous use of confocal fluorescence and atomic force microscopy (AFM) has allowed for correlating the morphology/conformation of individual nanoparticle oligomers or molecules with their photo-physics.[2, 3] In particular, we have employed the tip of an AFM cantilever to apply c…
Micro-Raman characterization of graphene grown on SiC(000-1)
2014
Graphene (Gr) was grown on the C face of 4H-SiC under optimized conditions (high annealing temperatures ranging from 1850 to 1950°C in Ar ambient at 900 mbar) in order to achieve few layers of Gr coverage. Several microscopy techniques, including optical microscopy (OM), ?Raman spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM) and atomic resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) have been used to extensively characterize the lateral uniformity of the as-grown layers at different temperatures. ?Raman analysis provided information on the variation of the number of layers, of the stacking-type, doping and strain.
Single-molecule switching with non-contact atomic force microscopy
2011
We report upon controlled switching of a single 3,4,9,10-perylene tetracarboxylic diimide derivative molecule on a rutile TiO(2)(110) surface using a non-contact atomic force microscope at room temperature. After submonolayer deposition, the molecules adsorb tilted on the bridging oxygen row. Individual molecules can be manipulated by the atomic force microscope tip in a well-controlled manner. The molecules are switched from one side of the row to the other using a simple approach, taking benefit of the sample tilt and the topography of the titania substrate. From density functional theory investigations we obtain the adsorption energies of different positions of the molecule. These adsorp…
Three-dimensional atomic force microscopy mapping at the solid-liquid interface with fast and flexible data acquisition
2016
We present the implementation of a three-dimensional mapping routine for probing solid-liquid interfaces using frequency modulation atomic force microscopy. Our implementation enables fast and flexible data acquisition of up to 20 channels simultaneously. The acquired data can be directly synchronized with commercial atomic force microscope controllers, making our routine easily extendable for related techniques that require additional data channels, e.g., Kelvin probe force microscopy. Moreover, the closest approach of the tip to the sample is limited by a user-defined threshold, providing the possibility to prevent potential damage to the tip. The performance of our setup is demonstrated …