New implementation of a shear-force microscope suitable to study topographical features over wide areas

A new implementation of a shear-force microscope is described that uses a shear-force detection system to perform topographical imaging of large areas (similar to 1x1 mm(2)). This implementation finds very interesting application in the study of archeological or artistic samples. Three dc motors are used to move a sample during a scan, allowing the probe tip to follow the surface and to face height differences of several tens of micrometers. This large-area topographical imaging mode exploits new subroutines that were added to the existing homemade software; these subroutines were created in Microsoft VISUAL BASIC 6.0 programming language. With this new feature our shear-force microscope can be used to study topographical details over large areas of archaeological samples in a nondestructive way. We show results detecting worn reliefs over a coin. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.