Optimizing the accuracy of viscoelastic characterization with AFM force–distance experiments in the time and frequency domains

Abstract

Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) force-distance (FD) experiments have emerged as an attractive alternative to traditional micro-rheology measurement techniques owing to their versatility of use in materials of a wide range of mechanical properties. Here, we show that the range of time dependent behaviour which can reliably be resolved from the typical method of FD inversion (fitting constitutive FD relations to FD data) is inherently restricted by the experimental parameters: sampling frequency, experiment length, and strain rate. Specifically, we demonstrate that violating these restrictions can result in errors in the values of the parameters of the complex modulus. In the case of complex materials, such as cells, whose behaviour is not specifically understood a priori, the physical sensibility of these parameters cannot be assessed and may lead to falsely attributing a physical phenomenon to an artifact of the violation of these restrictions. We use arguments from information theory to understand the nature of these inconsistencies as well as devise limits on the range of mechanical parameters which can be reliably obtained from FD experiments. The results further demonstrate that the nature of these restrictions depends on the domain (time or frequency) used in the inversion process, with the time domain being far more restrictive than the frequency domain. Finally, we demonstrate how to use these restrictions to better design FD experiments to target specific timescales of a material's behaviour through our analysis of a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) polymer sample.