July 1st AM

Today, we built a primitive caveman AFM. We cut a flexible cantilever out of a coffee cup. Glue a plastic fork tip to the cantilever end and fasten a chip of Silicon wafer onto the back of the cantilever end that has the tip. We shine a green laser pointer vertically onto the Silicon reflector and saw the reflection of the green laser on a vertical white paper. It seems to work fairly well and we could use this caveman AFM in the classroom for measuring different heights of objects ,such as, coins, paperclips, erasers, etc. The cofee cup cantilever needs to be calibrated with objects of known heights first. A graph of deflected position versus known height can be plotted. The height of any object can be estimated from the graph when we know the delected position of the green laser. A cool cheap toy that is easy to make for the students. Students can also make their own macro version of the cantilever of an AFM.