Atomic force microscopy on liquid crystals.

This chapter provides an introduction to the atomic force microscopy (AFM) on thermotropic liquid crystals. We first give a general introduction to the technique of AFM and then describe the special requirements that have to be met for the imaging of liquid-crystalline surfaces. We also discuss the relation between the quality or reliability of the imaging results and various parameters of the scanning conditions. We briey review the existing work on AFM on liquid crystals and finally describe applications beyond the imaging, such as molecular force spectroscopy or manipulation of surface structures