Hybridizing surface probe microscopies

About this book

"PREFACE Many are the books and reviews about scanning probe microscopies that cover the basics of their performance, novel developments and state-of-the-art applications. This book may appear to be another of this kind. But it is not. Indeed, this is not another book about scanning probe microscopy (SPM). As authors, we do not aim to focus on what SPM can do, but rather on what SPM cannot do and, most specifically, on presenting the experimental approaches that circumvent these limitations. The approaches are based on the combination of the SPM with two or more techniques that are complementary, in the sense that they can do something that the former cannot. This serves a double purpose: on the one hand, the so-resulting hybrid instrument outperforms the constituent techniques, since it combines their individual capabilities and cancels out their individual limitations. On the other hand, such instrument allows performing experiments of dissimilar nature in a simultaneous manner. But to understand the limitations of any technique also means to understand how this technique works. We do not skip this essential point; on the contrary, we have rather devoted a considerable amount of book space in explaining the basics of each technique as they are being introduced. In the case of SPM, we have endeavoured to present its fundamentals from a different, rather intuitive, perspective that, in our opinion, makes it distinctive from previous literature on the topic and it ultimately serves a pedagogical purpose. At the same time, we have tried to avoid explaining the particularities of each SPM-based technique and opted for a rather generalized approach that may suit everyone"--