Journal of Electron Microscopy Advance Access originally published online on February 15, 2007
Journal of Electron Microscopy 2007 56(1):21-25; doi:10.1093/jmicro/dfm001
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Calibration of the spring constant of AFM cantilever
State Key Laboratory for Mesoscopic Physics, School of Physics, Peking University Beijing 100871, P. R. China
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: yudp{at}pku.edu.cn
Several methods have been developed in recent years to calibrate the spring constant of atomic force microscopy (AFM) cantilever. In the present work, an effective and practical improvement is made on these methods to provide a more convenient calibration method. Simplifying the originally tedious procedures by just examining the cantilever's dimensions in scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and the resonance frequency of the cantilever from Q curves in AFM system, the spring constants of different cantilevers are calculated by the methods of Cleveland and Sader. The results are close to the nominal values provided by the manufacturers, which indicates that simplifying the procedures is valid and reliable. Moreover, it shows that spring constants acquiring by Cleveland method is more close to their nominal values than Sader's method does.
Keywords spring constant, resonance frequency, cantilever, calibration, Q curve, atomic force microscopy
Received 30 November 2006, accepted 9 January 2007