Best practices and recommendations for accurate nanomechanical characterization of heterogeneous polymer systems with atomic force microscopy

The past two decades have seen atomic force microscopy (AFM) evolve from an experimental technique to probe simple surface topography to one that can spatially map nanoscale material properties with exquisite sensitivity and high resolution. An expanding array of modes and analysis methods has made AFM a widely used technique for extracting nanoscale elastic and viscoelastic data from polymers and other soft materials. However, the assumptions...