Scanning in atomic force microscopy

In this paper, we present an adaptive scanning approach for atomic force microscopy (AFM) imaging. Our simulation results demonstrate that this new approach can achieve approximately one order of magnitude better scanning efficiency over current scanning method. The basic idea of our new approach is two-fold: the scan speed along the fast-scan axis is adaptive to the local curvature and slope in the fast-scan direction; the scan-line interval along the slow-scan axis is adaptive to curvature along the slow-scan direction.