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Does an AFM need to be have a technician responsible for it?  Or a senior scientist who can train others to use it? In many research labs, the answer seems to be “no”. Or at least, there is no-one fully responsible for the AFM, who can advise on experiment design, sample preparation, and train users, or even just run users’ samples. In this blog post, I’ll talk about why this situation exists, and what should be done about it.  

 


Image of dsDNA captured by a student on one of our courses. Such images can be challenging to acquire without adequate training.

In research labs in academia, (and, to a lesser extent, also in industry), there are often two kinds of facilities, those that are operated by individual researchers, in their own projects, and those that are run either ONLY by technicians /senior scientists, or only by fully qualified researchers under the close supervision of an expert. For example, in chemistry, a common instrument that is usually left to researchers (such as students) to run by themselves, is a UV/visible spectrometer. This is a pretty simple instrument, that is kind of a “black box”, which requires minimal training to use correctly.This is not to say that some things cannot go wrong, but an occasional prod in the right direction is all that’s required. Typically, if any-one is responsible for the instrument, they often just change the bulb now and again. More complex instruments are often run the same way, up to optical microscopes. But this is not the same for nanometre-resolution microscope, right?

 

Electron microscopes are *rarely* solely user-operated. They nearly always have a technician responsible, who might be the only one to use the microscope at all. When I began to use electron microscopes, it was clear that I was not going to get my hands on the instrument, until after a very thorough training lasting several weeks, and costing a lot of money. After this, I used the instrument for a long period of supervised operation, before finally being considered independent. This makes sense, for several reasons:

 

So, what about the AFM? Doesn’t all this hold true for an AFM?

 

Surprisingly, there are many many cases where AFM instruments do not have a responsible user, let alone a technician. In the AFM training course I teach, something like 50% of the people who need training say there’s an AFM in the lab and no-one knows how to use it.

 

There are many AFM instruments sitting in lab corners, barely if ever used, or used only by un-trained students.

 

So, why is this? All those bullets points up there kinda hold true for AFM, don’t they? I think they mostly do, but I think the difference is in the last part.

 

An AFM can be a low-cost instrument! And an AFM might be very small indeed...which will often lead to the erroneous idea that it’s a simple instrument to use. Is AFM more difficult than electron microscopy? I don’t think so, but most electron microscopists seem to think so. Then again, perhaps this is because they’ve never been trained properly in use of an AFM.

Let’s look at cost; here’s a rough idea of what it costs to get an instrument with 1 nm resolution:  

 

TEM

SEM

AFM

around 1,000,000 USD

around 400,000 USD

40,000 to 100,000 USD

NOTE: These are “typical purchase costs”, and any of them might costs more or less than this, but not by an order of magnitude….

 

Now, these 3 instruments would not be the same, and I am not saying a 40,000 dollar AFM can do everything a million dollar electron microscope can do, but with these three instruments, you can achieve around 1 nm resolution. To explain what you can really do with them could make another looong blog post...

 

But, wow, it’s a big difference, isn’t it? Add to this the fact that a TEM takes up an entire room to itself, and may even need the ceilings raised to fit in (and it usually won’t fit through your door, either!), and you can start to see why sometimes people take the TEM or SEM more “seriously”...If you have to raise a million dollars in funding to buy a microscope, you are going to make damn well sure that a: It’s not broken by incompetent users, and b), that you get some money back to keep it going by selling services.

 

So there we have our poor little AFM, it’s the new kid on the block, electron microscopists don’t understand it, and no-one ever gets properly trained. Some AFMs are actually installed by technicians who don’t know how to used it.

 

So what can you do?

 

All of these are difficult, but check out our training courses here: http://afmhelp.com/course

 

I would be interested to hear what other people think about this, it’s something I’ve been telling people a long time, and no-one has contradicted me (audibly) yet! Do people out there who can use  AFMs and EMs think one is more difficult than the other? Modern electron microscopes are also highly automated, partially due to more mature technology, and partly, I guess, to justify their high costs!

 

 

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