Active control of acoustics-caused nano-vibration in atomic force microscope imaging

Highlights: • An active-control to eliminate the acoustic-caused AFM-probe vibration is proposed. • A data-driven finite-impulse-response (FIR)-based feedforward control is developed. • The proposed algorithm can be easily integrated to an existing AFM control software. • Experimental results on AFM imaging showed the efficacy of the proposed approach. In this paper, we propose a finite-impulse-response (FIR)-based feedforward control approach to mitigate the acoustic-caused probe vibration during atomic force microscope (AFM) imaging. Compensation for the acoustic-caused probe vibration is important, as environmental disturbances including acoustic noise induce nano-scale probe vibration, directly affecting the AFM performance in applications such as imaging, nanomechanical characterization, and nanomanipulation. Although conventional passive noise cancellation apparatus has been employed, limitation exists, and residual noise still persists. Thus, a FIR-based active feedforward control approach is developed, by exploring a data-driven approach to account for the vibrational dynamics of the probe caused by the environmental acoustic noise in the controller design. An experimental implementation in AFM imaging application is presented and discussed to illustrate the proposed technique. Experimental results show that the FIR-based feedforward control is promising to not only complement, but also alleviate the limitations of passive noise control in AFM operations.