Journal of Materials Science, Vol.35, No.3, 757-765, 2000
Atomic force microscopy using plastic replicas
Scanning probe microscopy is now an accepted tool in both industrial and research efforts. Its development parallels the advances in technology and imaging applications found in the history of progress of both transmission electron microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. All three forms of microscopy ultimately suffer a fundamental application problem-situations arise where it is either unreasonable or impossible to observe a particular sample within the sample stage of the microscope. For the transmission and electron and scanning electron microscopies, this problem has been resolved by resorting to making a replica of the area of interest on the actual sample and preparing the replica so that it may be imaged directly by the desired microscopy technique. This work attempts to ascertain the suitability of observing replicas using a scanned probe microscope; specifically, employing the techniques of atomic force microscopy to image plastic surface replicas.
Keywords:CRACK