Vibration-mode based real-time nanoimaging and nanomanipulation

A novel method based on vibration-mode of the atomic force microscope (AFM) for nanoimaging and nanomanipulation is introduced in this paper. With this approach, the amplitude of OMSPV (opto-electronic measurement signal of probe vibration) can be used as a feedback signal to detect and control the operation state under vibration-mode. By controlling the amplitude of AFM probe, the tip-sample interaction force can be sufficiently adjusted. Therefore, vibration-mode of AFM system can be used to manipulate nano-entities just as in using the standard contact- mode manipulation strategy. Using the novel method, nanoimaging and nanomanipulation could both be performed in vibration-mode, and the damages of the sample and probe tip can be reduced significantly. Furthermore, by detecting the amplitude of OMSPV change during operation, the precise position information between the probe tip and nano-entities (e.g., CNTs) can be determined automatically as well. Experiments show that the amplitude of OMSPV will be in USPV (unstable state of probe vibration) when the tip is at the edge of CNTs due to the real-time adjustment of parameters of the AFM control system. Such USPV can be used to determine whether the manipulation succeeds in real-time. The correlative analysis and signal processing method is also presented in the paper.