Exploring Scanning Probe Microscopy with Mathematica

Dror Sarid
University of Arizona

A book consisting of a collection of self-contained, interactive, computational examples from the fields of scanning tunneling microscopy, scanning force microscopy, and related technologies using Mathematica notebooks will be discussed. It was written in Mathematica Version 2.2 as a series of notebooks and was then translated into the TeX typesetting language using the nb2tex program. Software associated with this book can be downloaded from Wiley's FTP server. The main motivation for writing a book such as this arose from often encountered situations where published models in the field of scanning probe microscopies require prior knowledge of other theoretical results. The reader of such material therefore needs to track down other publications that sometimes use different notations. A self-consistent, self-contained presentation would therefore be a real time-saver. A second motivation was the time-consuming effort required to code models that contain subtleties that are not easy to spot. The code presented in this book, being self-contained, alleviates this problem. A third motivation was associated with the benefit of working interactively with a live mathematical model and being able to change the values of its parameters. The computational results, which might range over unanticipated values, could provide better insight into the intricacies of a given problem than, say, reading plain text and browsing through several examples. The advantage of this book is that it provides an active approach to the study of and research in scanning probe microscopy. This book will be used for classwork at the Optical Sciences Center, University of Arizona.