The effect of off-end tip distance on the nanomanipulation based on rectangular and V-shape cantilevered AFMs

The AFM system, which is used as a nanomanipulator, includes a probe consistent of a cantilever and a tapered tip. In cantilevers, the tip can be located in different distances from the cantilever free end. This causes to change in stiffness of the cantilever and therefore changing in pushing force of the nanomanipulation. In this paper, the effect of the tip distance on the cantilever stiffness is studied using the equations of Hazel, and Neumeister and Ducker (ND), and a new equation to correct the torsional stiffness of V-shaped cantilevers (VSC) is proposed, which is based on the ND equation. Then, the effect of distance on pushing force of AFM-based nanomanipulations with rectangular cantilevered (RC) and VSC AFMs is simulated. The obtained results using proposed equation show that increasing of distance causes to non-linear increment of torsional stiffness of VSC. Error of the proposed equation is achieved less than 3% in comparison with result of torsional stiffness equation of ND. Moreover, it is observed that the torsional stiffness of VSC predicted by Hazel’s equation is considerably inaccurate. In nanomanipulation studies, the necessary pushing forces of nanoparticle motion are increased by increment of distance, for both types of cantilevers (RC and VSC). Moreover, critical time for RC AFM increases, but in the case of VSC AFM, the critical time decreases at first, then it is almost constant at a limited range of d, and finally it starts to increase by increasing the distance.