Related papers: Confronting Interatomic Force Measurements
Quantum fluctuations give rise to van der Waals and Casimir forces that dominate the interaction between electrically neutral objects at sub-micron separations. Under the trend of miniaturization, such quantum electrodynamical effects are…
A nanometric needle sensor mounted in an Atomic Force Microscopy allows systematic picometer-range distance measurements. This force sensing device is used in Piezoresponse Force Microscopy (PFM) as a distance sensor, by employing the…
A quite straightforward approximation for the electrostatic interaction between two perfectly conducting surfaces suggests itself when the distance between them is much smaller than the characteristic lengths associated to their shapes.…
Tapping mode atomic force microscopy is a standard technique for inspection and analysis at the nanometer scale. The understanding of the non-linear dynamics of the system due to the tip sample interaction is an important prerequisite for a…
Atoms or pairs of ions picked up by probe tips used in dynamic force microscopy (DFM) can be strongly displaced and even hop discontinuously upon approach to the sample surface. The energy barriers for some of those hops are of the right…
Gravity is the weakest fundamental interaction and the only one that has not been measured at the particle level. Traditional experimental methods, from astronomical observations to torsion balances, use macroscopic masses to both source…
Magnetic force microscopy (MFM) allows one to image the domain structure of ferromagnetic samples by probing the dipole forces between a magnetic probe tip and a magnetic sample. The magnetic domain structure of the sample depends on the…
Quantum technologies exploit entanglement to revolutionize computing, measurements, and communications. This has stimulated the research in different areas of physics to engineer and manipulate fragile many-particle entangled states.…
We study the non-contact friction between an atomic force microscope tip and a metal substrate in the presence of bias voltage. The friction is due to energy losses in the sample created by the electromagnetic field from the oscillating…
This paper addresses a simple question: how small can one make a gravitational source mass and still detect its gravitational coupling to a nearby test mass? We describe an experimental scheme based on micromechanical sensing to observe…
Fundamental understanding of interatomic forces in molecules must emerge from quantum mechanics, yet widely used empirical force fields rely on simplified mechanistic approximations that often fail to capture the complexity of many-body…
Atomic scale friction, an indispensable element of nanotechnology, requires a direct access to, under actual growing shear stress, its successive live phases: from static pinning, to depinning and transient evolution, eventually ushering in…
Interference is fundamental to wave dynamics and quantum mechanics. The quantum wave properties of particles are exploited in metrology using atom interferometers, allowing for high-precision inertia measurements [1, 2]. Furthermore, the…
The periodicity inherent to any interferometric signal entails a fundamental trade-off between sensitivity and dynamic range of interferometry-based sensors. Here we develop a methodology for significantly extending the dynamic range of…
We show that functionalized micromechanical bilayer levers can be used as sensitive probes to accurately measure radiative heat flux in vacuum between two materials at the micro scale. By means of calibration to one material these…
The interaction of Na atoms with a surface was probed by inserting a nanofabricated material grating into one arm of an atom interferometer (IFM). This technique permits a direct measurement of the change in phase and coherence of matter…
Optical atomic clocks are the most accurate measurement devices ever constructed and have found many applications in fundamental science and technology. The use of highly charged ions (HCI) as a new class of references for highest accuracy…
The activated torsion oscillation magnetometer exploits the mechanical resonance of a cantilever beam, driven by the torque exerted on the sample by an ac field applied perpendicularly to the film plane. We describe a model for the…
The local work function of a surface determines the spatial decay of the charge density at the Fermi level normal to the surface. Here, we present a method that enables simultaneous measurements of local work function and tip-sample forces.…
In the presence of Earth gravity and gravity-gradient forces, centrifugal and Coriolis forces caused by the Earth rotation, the phase of the time-domain atom interferometers is calculated with accuracy up to the terms proportional to the…