Background force compensation in dynamic atomic force microscopy

Background forces are linear long range interactions of the cantilever body with its surroundings that must be compensated for in order to reveal tip-surface force, the quantity of interest for determining material properties in atomic force microscopy. We provide a mathematical derivation of a method to compensate for background forces, apply it to experimental data, and discuss how to include background forces in simulation. Our method, based on linear response theory in the frequency domain, provides a general way of measuring and compensating for any background force and it can be readily applied to different force reconstruction methods in dynamic AFM.