Frequency-domain analysis method for analyzing and improving the steady-state characteristics of microcantilever in tapping-mode atomic force microscopy

In tapping-mode AFM, the steady-state characteristics of microcantilever are extremely important to determine the AFM performance. Due to the external excitation signal and the tip-sample interactions, the solving process of microcantilever motion equation will become very complicated with the traditional time-domain analysis method. In this paper, we propose the novel frequency-domain analysis method to analyze and improve the steady-state characteristics of microcantilever. Compared with the previous methods, this new method has three prominent advantages. Firstly, the analytical expressions of amplitude and phase of cantilever system can be derived conveniently. Secondly, the stability of the cantilever system can be accurately determined and the stability margin can be obtained quantitatively in terms of the phase margin and the magnitude margin. Thirdly, on this basis, external control mechanism can be devised quickly and easily to guarantee the high stability of the cantilever system. With this novel method, we derive the frequency response curves and discuss the great influence of the intrinsic parameters on the system stability, which provides theoretical guidance for selecting samples to achieve better AFM images in the experiments. Moreover, we introduce a new external series correction method to significantly increase the stability margin. The results indicate that the cantilever system is no longer easily disturbed by external interference signals.