The scalability of this approach makes it well suited for imaging applications that require high resolution over large areas. Specifically, optically reflective conical probes on a comparatively compliant film are found to comprise a distributed optical lever that translates probe motion into an optical signal that provides sub-10 nm vertical precision. Here, we show that massively parallel AFM with >1000 probes is possible through the combination of a cantilever-free probe architecture and a scalable optical method for detecting probe–sample contact. Despite the tremendous impact of AFM in fields including materials science, biology, and surface science, the limitation in imaging area has remained a key barrier to studying samples with intricate hierarchical structure.
Atomic force microscopy (AFM), in which a cantilevered probe deflects under the influence of local forces as it scans across a substrate, is a key example of this tradeoff with high resolution imaging being largely limited to small areas.
Resolution and field-of-view often represent a fundamental tradeoff in microscopy.
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