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Research Overview: Atomic Force Microscopy

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
- Abraham Maslow

This page provides some details about an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) that I built a couple years ago as the basis of a new undergraduate control lab. The microscope itself is a very simple instrument, built almost entirely from off-the-shelf components and can be constructed in a day or so by a non-expert. It's not accurate enough to take commercial-level scans, but it does well enough to make interesting images for undergrads (see slideshow below). Details of the AFM are available in the paper below entitled "A Cost-Effective Atomic Force Microscope for Undergraduate Control Laboratories". An idea of some of the experiments that can be done with it can be gotten from the lab script, which is also below "Engineering Tripos Part IIA, Project 15: Atomic Force Microscope".

The microscope's been in use for the last two years at the university of Cambridge, and for one year at ETH in Zurich. If you are interested in constructing one for yourself, then I'm more than happy to help you. The parts cost approx 15,000 USD (although cheaper substitutions are possible) and there is only one custom component that's required. I can either give you CAD drawings, or just ship you a pre-made one (it's very simple and cheap). Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Here are some scans taken by myself and some students with the microscope.

Publications

C.N. Jones, G. Gonçalves, A Cost-Effective Atomic Force Microscope for Undergraduate Control Laboratories, Technical Report, vol. AUT08-04, 2008
More details available here
This paper presents a simple, cost-effective and robust Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), which has been purpose designed and built for use as a teaching aid in undergraduate controls labs. The guiding design principle is to have all components be open and visible to the students and as a result, the inner functioning of the microscope is clear to see. All but one part are off the shelf, and assembly time is less than two days, which makes the microscope a robust instrument, that is readily handled by the students with little chance of damage. While the scanning resolution is nowhere near that of a commercial instrument, it is more than sufficient to take interesting scans of micrometer-scaled objects.
C.N. Jones, G. Gonçalves, Engineering Tripos Part IIA, Project 15: Atomic Force Microscope, , 2006
More details available here
This is a copy of the script for the lab that third year students at Cambridge take using the microscope.

Software

We're happy to give out all code for running the microscope (LabView) and the lab (Matlab). Please feel free to contact me for details.

The work in this section is done in collaboration with

Further reading



Last modified: August 18 2008.