Agar Scientific has announced their broad range of sample substrates for use by the SPM community in applications such as life sciences and materials sciences.
HOPG and mica have long been used in the SPM community, not only for mounting samples but also for calibration on the atomic scale.
Agar's HOPG consists of planes of carbon atoms (002) which are highly orientated with respect to each other.
This is characterised by the mosaic-spread angle which is 3.5deg plus or minus 1.5deg, while substrates with more highly ordered planes, with mosaic angles of 0.8deg plus or minus 0.2deg and 0.4deg plus or minus 0.1deg, are also available .
They are supplied in a variety of sample sizes while mica disks are available in packs of ten with diameters of either 9.9 or 14mm.
Precious metal substrates of gold, silver and platinum are also available.
Whether being used for electrochemistry or for sample mounting, these substrates come with excellent flatness.
The standard gold substrates are supplied with a base material of borosilicate glass, usually 0.7mm in thickness.
This special glass substrate is well suited for the flame annealing procedure to produce Au(111) terraces.
Specialist gold samples may be supplied on quartz and are suited for high temperature experiments.
Silver substrates are often used where the silver acts as an electrode while platinum may have other specialist uses.
Also available are gold colloids of known size that provide both a substrate for binding biomaterials and as a reliable means of characterising tip geometry and calibrating the Z axis to piezo-electric response.
The incompressible, monodispersive, spherical nature of the colloids can also be used to characterise the vertical dimension of coadsorbed biomolecules.
The standard kit has particles of 5, 15 and 30nm diameter, eight numbered mica-coated 12mm discs, disc carrier and a magnetic pick-up tool.
Extended kits contain additional colloids of 10 and 20nm diameter.
