By Nu Nano Ltd.
These ultra-soft probes were designed for non-conventional AFM systems, capable of detecting lateral or shear forces acting on the cantilever (e.g. Shear Force Microscopy, Transverse Dynamic Force Microscope). They operate in a vertical orientation which allows much more sensitive cantilevers to be used, since the cantilevers do not experience jump-to-contact events associated with using low-spring constant cantilevers for conventional AFM. NuNano designed extremely soft tip-less probes with spring constants in the range 0.003 – 6000 pN/nm. Different designs included a variety of cantilever lengths on the same chip, as well as probes with arrays of 10 identical cantilevers. These probes were fabricated from super-low-stress (non-stoichiometric) silicon nitride films on a standard silicon chip, with thicknesses of 50, 100 and 200 nm, but this could be further tailored to meet our customer's requirements. “We have been working with NuNano ever since they started making AFM probes commercially. They have built considerable expertise in microcantilever fabrication, which has enabled them to create some of the softest cantilevers ever made. These cantilevers have been crucial for our research and have allowed us to measure forces at least 1000 times smaller than conventional AFM allows. By combining these cantilevers with our instrumentation, we can now measure the movement of molecular motors, observe conformational changes of proteins, measure adhesion forces on protocells and detect extremely weak optical forces. None of this would be possible using conventional AFM probes.” — Dr Massimo Antognozzi, University of Bristol Publications - T. Scholz, J.A. Vicary, G.M. Jeppesen, A. Ulcinas, J.K.H. Hörber, M. Antognozzi (2011). “Processive behaviour of kinesin observed using micro-fabricated cantilevers”. Nanotechnology, 22, 095707. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0957-4484/22/9/095707/pdf - R.L. Harniman, D. Plana, G.H. Carter, K.A. Bradley, M.J. Miles & D.J. Fermin (2017).“Real-time tracking of metal nucleation via local perturbation of hydration layers”.Nature Communications 8, 971.http://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01087-1
