PARAMETRIC AND NONPARAMETRIC APPROACHES TO DETECTION IN MAGNETIC RESONANCE FORCE MICROSCOPY

We address signal detection in magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM) and single spin microscopy (SESM). MRFM and SESM are considered as a promising technology to provide nondestruc-tive and atomic-scale imaging. From a signal processing point of view, the main challenge is to extract very weak signals from mea-surements with a signal to noise ratio (SNR) typically less than 15 dB. We investigate two detection schemes based different fea-tures of the underlying system. The parametric approach is derived from the generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). The nonpara-metric approach exploits the spectral property of the observation. Numerical experiments show that both detectors provide excellent results at very low SNRs. 1