Visualization and analysis of nano-manipulation in liquid environment with atomic force microscopy

This paper focuses on theoretical analysis of afm based nano-manipulationin a liquid environment. to achieve this goal, major forces in the liquid environmentwere reviewed and the manipulation processes were modelled by introducing the eect ofintermolecular and hydrodynamic forces. the dynamic behaviour of pushing a gold nanoparticleof 50-nm radius on a silicon substrate at a velocity of 100 nm/s was investigated. avirtual reality user interface was also implemented and evaluated in a liquid environment,so users can get a sense of the forces. the results show that, in comparison to air, therequired forces and time are increased by 2 and 6.5% for sliding and 2 and 4.3% for rollingin a liquid environment. furthermore, for various submerged lengths of the cantilever inwater, forces and time values are varied at 8 and 10.5%, respectively. based on simulationresults, sliding occurs at nominal values and critical forces and manipulation times in theliquid environment increase over the values. for biological manipulation purposes, theliquid environment is superior in comparison to air and the obtained results are veried byexisting experiments.