Disclosing and overcoming the trade-off between noise and scanning speed in atomic force microscopy

Traditional dynamic modalities for atomic force microscopy imaging suffer from a stringent trade-off between fast scanning speed, weak interaction forces and accurate topography reconstruction. Finding an effective compromise between these aspects is often challenging, especially for soft biological samples for which stringent requirements hold when imaged in vivo. In this paper the main causes of this undesired trade-off in standard systems are analyzed and the exploitation of the intrinsic dynamics of the cantilever through a nonlinear control strategy is proposed as a method to overcome this limitation. A direct application to imaging of biological samples is reported to validate the results and show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.