Advanced studies of oscillating microcantilevers for rheology and imaging applications

Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) is an essential tool in nanoscale imaging and material characterization, widely applied in fields like biomedical research, environmental science, and materials engineering. This PhD thesis advances AFM technology by addressing challenges in two key applications: rheological fluid analysis and high-speed imaging. In rheology, AFMs's cantilevers are promising tools for sensing fluid properties, but it has been demonstrated that they exhibit nonlinear behaviors (jumps and hysteresis), that can potentially compromise the accuracy of measurements. Nevertheless, many experiments show that such phenomena seem to be related with the medium properties indeed, hence this thesis seeks to understand their origin with the aim to provide a basis for novel sensors based on AFMs's cantilever beams. Concerning imaging, AFMs are widely used due to their innumerable advantages compared to other types of microscope. However, the so called "parachuting effect" severely impacts on the performance of AFM, limiting at the same time the maximum achievable scanning speed. In this work, an algorithm has been implemented to correct parachuting in real time. The proposed method, not only allows real time correction of parachuting while allowing faster scanning speeds, but it can be implemented on commercial AFMs when typically the methods available in literature require ad-hoc solutions.