Nanosurf is a Swiss company that designs, makes and sells atomic-force microscopes (AFMs), which image materials by scanning a cantilever across a sample. In this video filmed at the 2022 March meeting of the American Physical Society in Chicago, Ed Nelson from Nanosurf explains the thinking behind its new DriveAFM product. Rather than relying on traditional piezoacoustic sensing, it uses “photothermal excitation”, which yields a cleaner signal with no cross-talk.

Nelson also discusses Nanosurf’s new imaging mode, in which the cantilever is driven off-resonance. As well as being faster, this “wave mode” is good for studying liquid samples – and in fact has already been used to study the outer shell of a virus on liver tissue. “Setting up an experiment in liquid is trivial,” says Nelson. “It’s almost as easy as working in air.”