Advanced mechanical design and control methods for atomic force microscopy in real-time

This article reviews mechanical design and control of atomic force microscopes (AFM) with a special emphasis on high-speed imaging. The mechanical design and the control system determine the achievable imaging speed of the AFM. To enable AFM imaging at video-rates, imaging speed - and thus system performance - has to be increased by at least two orders of magnitude relative to today's commercial AFMs. Methods and results presented in this paper demonstrate how this can be achieved.