Linkam Scientific Instruments has been chosen by JPK Instruments to supply a customised version of one of their cryo-stage systems to enable surface properties to be studied over an extended temperature range.
Linkam has been developing cryo stages for correlative microscopies for many years while JPK Instruments is regarded as a leading supplier of nanoscale resolution SPM & Optical Tweezer systems.
Bringing their technologies together has enabled JPK to offer cryo-stage capability for their NanoWizard AFM systems.
This means AFM users may now study surface property changes as a function of temperature over the range of -120 °C to +220°C.
The JPK Instruments CryoStage has many applications in material science and life science.
For example, the broad temperature range helps the study of several phase transitions of polymer films in one experiment observed on the nanometre scale.
The imaging of a crystalline polyethylene film at -120 °C has been performed. Details of this and other experiments may be found in application notes on JPK's web site.
Electrical and magnetic changes of surfaces may also be studied with varying temperature. These and other applications of thermal property studies such as cryopreservation will be looked at in future work.
