Quantification of dissipation and deformation in ambient atomic force microscopy

A formalism to extract and quantify unknown quantities such as sample deformation, the viscosity of the sample and surface energy hysteresis in amplitude modulation atomic force microscopy is presented. Recovering the unknowns only requires the cantilever to be accurately calibrated and the dissipative processes occurring during sample deformation to be well modeled. The theory is validated by comparison with numerical simulations and shown to be able to provide, in principle, values of sample deformation with picometer resolution.