Measuring Material Stiffness and Adhesion On The Nanoscale With AFM

https://www.mccrone.com • Mechanical properties on the nanoscale can be critical to applications in failure analysis, quality control, and structure-property relationships where the materials you are trying to measure are very small (less than a micron) laterally, or very thin where you don’t have much material to probe. We will review methods to measure specifically the modulus of a material or its stiffness, and its stickiness or adhesion on these nanometer length scales. These methods are particularly appropriate for a wide range of materials including polymers, biological materials, thin films, and other soft materials.