Background force compensation in dynamic atomic force microscopy

Abstract

Background forces are linear long-range interactions of the cantilever body with its surroundings that must be compensated for in order to reveal tip-surface force, the quantity of interest for determining material properties in atomic force microscopy. We provide a mathematical derivation of a method to compensate for background forces, apply it to experimental data, and discuss how to include background forces in simulation. Our method, based on linear-response theory in the frequency domain, provides a general way of measuring and compensating for any background force and it can be readily applied to different force reconstruction methods in dynamic AFM.