Use of biaxially oriented polypropylene film for evaluating and cleaning contaminated atomic force microscopy probe tips: An application to blind tip reconstruction

Abstract

An atomic force microscopy (AFM) image of a surface is basically a convolution of the probe tip geometry and the surface features; it is important to know this tip effect to ensure that an image truly reflects the surface features. We have found that a biaxially oriented polypropylene (BOPP) film is suitable for checking tip performance and for cleaning contaminated tips, thus making it possible to collect images of the same area of a BOPP film surface before and after the tip was cleaned. Therefore, the difference between the two different images is solely due to the contamination of the tip. We took advantage of our ability to collect AFM images of the same area using the same tip, in one instance, contaminated and, in the other, after being cleaned. First we used blind reconstruction on the image collected using the contaminated tip. Blind tip reconstruction allows one to extract the geometry of the tip from a given image. Once we had estimated the geometry of the contaminated tip, we used it to simulate the tip effect using the image collected using the cleaned tip. By comparing the simulation result with the image collected using the contaminated tip we showed that the blind reconstruction routine works well. Prior to this, there was no de facto method for testing blind reconstruction algorithms.