title: Amplitude Modulation Mode of Scanning Ion Conductance Microscopy.
abstract: Live-cell imaging at the nanoscale resolution is a hot research topic in the field of life sciences for the direct observation of cellular biological activity. Scanning ion conductance microscopy (SICM) is one of the few effective imaging tools for live-cell imaging at the nanoscale resolution. However, there are various problems in existing scanning modes. The hopping and AC modes suffer from low speed, whereas the DC mode is prone to instability because of the DC drift and external electrical interference. In this article, we propose an amplitude modulation (AM) mode of SICM, which employs an AC voltage to enhance the stability and improve the scanning speed. In this AM mode, we introduce a capacitance compensation method to eliminate capacitance effect and use the amplitude of the AC current component to control the tip movement. Experimental results on polydimethylsiloxane samples verify the validity of the AM mode and demonstrate an improved performance of both speed and stability of this new mode.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Peng
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China lqliu@sia.cn gli@engr.pitt.edu.
authors.forename: Lianqing
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China.
authors.forename: Yang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China.
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Dong
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China.
authors.forename: Yuechao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA, USA.
authors.forename: Guangyong
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Li
mesh_terms: D004129:Dimethylpolysiloxanes; D025802:Electric Capacitance; D004867:Equipment Design; D008853:Microscopy / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D036103:Nanotechnology
chemical_list: D004129:Dimethylpolysiloxanes; C013830:baysilon
keywords: AC voltage; AM mode; capacitance compensation; nanoscale imaging; scanning ion conductance microscopy