Ultramicroscopy 182 (2017) 1–9
Cezary Dziekonski, Wojciech Dera, Dariusz M. Jarzabek
Nanosurf customers from the Polish Academy of Sciences published a new method to calibrate the lateral force constant. The procedure does not require any knowledge about material or geometrical parameters of an investigated cantilever.
In the method described, a commercially available microforce sensor with advanced electronics is used for direct measurement of the friction force applied by the cantilever’s tip to the flat surface of the microforce sensor measuring beam. Due to Newton's third law, the friction force measured by the microforce sensor is equal to the torsional force exerted on the cantilever. Therefore, the torsional (lateral force) signal can be directly compared with the signal from the microforce sensor, and thus the lateral force calibration constant is determined.
The method is easy to perform and could be widely used for the lateral force calibration constant determination in many types of atomic force microscopes.
The inventors have started a spin-off company tridec for the commercialization of this product, called the TetraX Lateral force microscope calibrator (LFMC).
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