โ Scribed by Knapp, H. F.; Stemmer, A.
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Hydrophobic coatings for atomic force microscopy (AFM) tips generated through sputter coating with gold, chemical vapour deposition from a hexaรuoropropene plasma or silanization with octadecyltrichlorosilane are compared with respect to their macroscopic hydropobicity, inรuence on tip radius, abrasion behaviour during imaging and complexity of the coating procedure. The performance of the coated tips is assessed by measuring their adhesion from force curves at di โ erent humidities. From these tests, the hexaรuoropropene plasma-treated tips turned out to exhibit the best overall quality and so are used to image the hexagonally packed intermediate surface (HPI) layer of the eubacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, a natural two-dimensional protein crystal, to demonstrate the capability of these tips to image fragile, hydrophilic samples at high humidities with reduced tip-sample adhesion.
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Biodegradable alginate-derived polymeric surfactants (APSs) with a linear alkyl group (C8, C12, C16) were synthesized by oxidation followed by reductive amination of 2,3-dialdehydic alginate. The oxidized alginates and all APSs were characterized by spectral and X-ray diffractometry analysis. The so