Sharing my fifteen years experience in the research field of Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM)

Abstract

Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) was developed by Binnig and his coworkers in the year 1986. He was awarded Nobel Prize in physics for this work in 1986 in sharing with Rohrer and Ruska. Rationale to develop AFM: Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), the precursor to AFM is efficient in imaging electrically conducting specimen at atomic resolution. The impetus for development of AFM came to Binnig’s mind because of relatively poor efficiency of STM to image electrically non-conducting biological samples. He wondered why the surfaces be always imaged with a current but not with a force. He thought if small forces of interactions between a probe tip atoms and specimen surface atoms could be detected and amplified then imaging of biological specimen would be possible at a very high resolution.