Scanning Probe Microscopy

A clearer way to scratch the surface by David Bradley

Scanning probe microscopy (SPM) is a powerful three-dimensional technique for studying structures and physical properties of microscopic surfaces including drugs and proteins down to the atomic scale.


Phil Williams of the University of Nottingham realised that as good as SPM is, the images can be fuzzy because of distortion of the microscope tip.

He and his colleagues have designed software that works out how far from perfect the tip is and compensates for this in producing the image. The whole system is now run on a web server so that scientists around the world can access the site and obtain much clearer images from their data.

Scanning probe microscopes are based around a piezoelectric crystal, which moves a tiny atom-sized tip that, not surprisingly, "scans" a surface. The tip bobs along the electron cloud of the surface and the signal it passes back to the microscope is interpreted as a three-dimensional map of the material's surface to atomic resolution.

Williams' data analysis system is a deceptively simple extension of this interpretation process. All the user has to do is up-load their microscope image data in raw format to the Web site. Williams' designer software analyses image distortion and resolves it using non-linear equations. The site has been used hundreds of times in the year or so since it was set-up and the team have obtained useful feedback to help them fine-tune the software for their own purposes in return.

The next process in line for the online treatment is X-ray photoelectron peak-fitting software and maximum entropy software for enhancing NMR spectra.

Back to the Elemental Discoveries Feb 98 index page

This item originally appeared in the February 1998 issue of Elemental Discoveries, David Bradley Science Writer's science webzine.

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