Design and characterisation of cantilevers for multi-frequency atomic force microscopy

The experimental characterisation of a set of microcantilevers targeted at use in multi-frequency atomic force microscope is presented. The aim of this work is to design a cantilever that naturally amplifies its harmonic oscillations which are introduced by nonlinear probe-sample interaction forces. This is performed by placing the modal frequencies of the cantilever at integer multiples of the first modal frequency. The developed routine demonstrates the placement of the frequency of the second to fifth mode. The characterisation shows a trend that lower-order modes are more accurately placed than higher-order modes. With two fabricated designs, the error in the second mode is at most 2.26% while the greatest error in the fifth mode is at 10.5%