Compensation of drift contamination in AFM image by local scan

Thermal drift in atomic force microscopy (AFM) is one of the major hurdles to achieve accurate and efficient AFM based nanomanipulation. AFM images are all contaminated by the thermal drift which often leads to failed manipulation operations. In this paper, a local scan strategy is applied to identify the thermal drift contamination in the AFM image and then the draft contamination is compensated. After an AFM image is captured, the entire image is divided into several strips along y direction. A local scan is immediately performed in each part of the image to determine the drift at that portion. In this manner, the drift value is calculated in a small local area instead of the global image. Thus, the drift can be more precisely estimated and the image can be more accurately recovered, and thus leading to improved accuracy of AFM image and enhanced efficiency in AFM based nanomanipulation.