Tip-Jump Response of an Amplitude-Modulated Atomic Force Microscope

The dynamic behaviors of an Atomic Force Microscope are of interest, and variously unpredictable phenomena are experimentally measured. In practical measurements, researchers have proposed many methods for avoiding these uncertainties. However, causes of these phenomena are still hard to demonstrate in simulation. To demonstrate these phenomena, this paper claims the tip-jump motion is a predictable process, and the jumping kinetic energy results in different nonlinear phenomena. It emphasizes the variation in the eigenvalues of an AFM with tip-sample distance. This requirement ensures the phase transformations from one associated with the oscillation mode to one associated with the tip-jump/sample-contact mode. Also, multi-modal analysis was utilized to ensure the modal transformation in varying tip-sample distances. In the presented model, oscillations with various tip-sample distances and with various excitation frequencies and amplitudes were compared. The results reveal that the tip-jump motion separates the oscillation orbit into two regions, and the jumping kinetic energy, comparing with the superficial potential energy, leads the oscillation to be bistable or intermittent. The sample-contact condition associates to bifurcation and chaos. Additionally, the jumping is a strong motion that occurrs before the tip-sample contacts, and this motion signal can replace the sample-contact-signal to avoid destroying the sample.