Atomic force microscopy using plastic replicas

Scanning probe microscopy is now an accepted tool in both industrial and re search efforts. Its development parallels the advances in technology and im aging applications found in the history of progress of both transmission el ectron microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. All three forms of micr oscopy ultimately suffer a fundamental application problem-situations arise where it is either unreasonable or impossible to observe a particular samp le within the sample stage of the microscope. For the transmission and elec tron 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 ob serving replicas using a scanned probe microscope; specifically, employing the techniques of atomic force microscopy to image plastic surface replicas . (C) 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.