Automated Extraction Of The Short-Range Part Of The Interaction In Non-Contact Atomic Force Microscopy

A method for the automated extraction of the short-range part of the probe-surface interaction from force spectroscopy curves is presented. Our algorithm consists of two stages: the first stage determines a boundary that separates the region where the short-range interaction is dominantly acting on the probe and a second stage that finds the parameters to fit the interaction over the long-range region. We applied this method to force spectroscopy maps acquired over the Si(111) - (7 x 7) surface and found, as a result, a faint pattern on the short-range interaction for one of the probes used in the experiments, which would have probably been obviated using human-supervised fitting strategies.