A mechanical approach to the dissipation process in NC-AFM: experiments, model and simulation

Experiments performed using NC-AFM on a pure graphite surface suggest that the mechanical deformation of the surface under test is able to explain the observed damping signal. A simple analytical model has been built to evaluate the damping signal in terms of the mechanical properties of the surface, the amplitude of the oscillation and the tip-surface distance. Besides these experiments and a model, a virtual NC-AFM microscope has been developed, based on the Matlab language. This virtual machine allows some assumptions of the analytical model to be validated or invalidated, since no approximations are made in solving the nonlinear differential equation which controls the tip-surface interaction and the NC-AFM electronic loop is included.