High-speed vertical positioning for contact-mode atomic force microscopy

Many popular modes of scanning probe microscopy require a vertical feedback system to regulate the tip-sample interaction. Unfortunately the vertical feedback controller imposes a severe limit on the scan-speed of scanning probe microscopes. In this paper, the foremost bandwidth limitation is identified to be the low-frequency mechanical resonances of the scanner. To overcome this limitation, a dual-stage vertical positioner is proposed. In this work, the bandwidth of a contact-mode atomic force microscope is increased from 83 Hz to 2.7 kHz. This improvement allows image quality to be retained with a speed increase of 33 times, or alternatively, feedback error can be reduced by 33 times if scan speed is not increased.