"Jamais 2 sans 3" as the French say, where number 3 worked as a charm. We were able to host the third SPM User Meeting in our home city and brought together more users than ever before to share their experiences with Zurich Instruments! Scanning probe microscopy is a broad...
Pour la seconde année consécutive, le réseau RéMiSoL, avec le soutien du CEA LETI, de l’IEMN et de partenaires industriels (NanoAndMore, Zurich Instruments), a proposé une action nationale de formation (ANF) CNRS le 7 et 8 novembre sur le thème de la microscopie à sonde de Kelvin (KFM, ou parfois...
It was an honor and privilege to host our first SPM User Meeting in Mainz this year in the group of Prof. Angelika Kuehnle. This two-day gathering was a time for intense knowledge sharing among Zurich Instruments' users with invited talks, tutorials in smaller groups and a poster session. Invited...
In many applications where the distance between two objects needs to be reduced to a predefined gap, the ability to control a stepper motor with clear stop conditions from different sensors is of high practical interest. Such functionality can be used to bring an optical lens to the appropriate working...
Phase-locked loops (PLL) or other PID controllers on nano-mechanical resonators rely on clean phase signals that exhibit large slope, or significant phase shift, around the resonance frequency. For really high-frequency NEMS and opto-mechanical systems above a few tens or hundreds of MHz, any small delay can have significant effect on...
This workshop organized with CNRS customers in Montpellier among the RéMiSoL network (Réseau des Microscopies à Sondes Locales) focused on all aspects of contact mechanics at the nanoscale and in particular using resonant contact AFM mode (CR-AFM). Contact resonance tracking measures the shift in resonance frequencies of the cantilever while...
In earlier blog posts, I presented several methods to synchronize data acquisition with third party instruments, either via the DIO input as a h ardware trigger (TTL pulse), some gated triggering scheme for pass/fail analysis or to capture only transient phenomena in a longer data stream ( ring-down method example)...
On June 3rd my colleague Romain Stomp and I welcomed Zurich Instruments' users with a focus in scanning probe microscopy (SPM) to visit us for the day at Leiden University in the Netherlands. In the morning, Romain shared his expertise with a presentation outlining how to optimally configure the HF2...
Earlier in November 2014, Zurich Instruments participated in a 2-day workshop on Piezoresponse Force Microscopy (PFM) organized by the Institut des Nanotechnologies de Lyon (INL) and the CNRS network RéMiSoL (Réseau des Microscopies à Sondes Locales). Starting with some theoretical introduction by Prof Brice Gautier, 2 parallel sessions on practical...
The challenge with FM-AFM mode (or NC-AFM) is that tip-sample interaction can be either attractive (negative frequency shift, -df) or repulsive (positive frequency shift, +df) which leads to different parameter settings for the Z feedback loop with, respectively, either a positive or negative slope. For atomically smooth surfaces this is...
