Utilizing Period-Doubling Bifurcations to Locate Grazing in Atomic Force Microscopy
Andrew Dick, Santiago Solares
A nonlinear beam model is developed to study the cantilever probe of an atomic force microscope. With a multi-mode approximation, atomic interaction forces from molecular dynamics simulations are used to simulate the system's response. An excitation frequency of two and a half times the fundamental frequency is studied. Period-doubling occurs for this off-resonance excitation in support of previous findings from a larger scale-model. Through a better understanding of the qualitative change in the behavior, it is believed that the period-doubling can be utilized in the development of a near-grazing based operation mode of the atomic force microscope