new SPM platform for heated probe AFM and Mass Spectrometry for naNoscale chemical analysis

The AFM-MS product resulting from this proposal will have two main benefits: a) Adding nanoscale spatial resolution to Mass Spectrometry (MS) industry b) Adding nanoscale chemical recognition to the Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) technique. This will be achieved by using Anasys proprietary nanoscale AFM thermal probe technology to perform thermal desorption of localized regions of the sample which are then ionized and taken into a MS. Mass spectrometry (MS) is one of the most widely used analytical techniques for chemical characterization. It is used routinely in a wide variety of industrial and academic laboratories in a wide set of applications such as polymers, pharmaceutics, life sciences, photovoltaics etc. Despite MS being a very powerful chemical analysis technique, when used as the detection system in chemical imaging its spatial resolution is restricted to several tens of microns when used with any one of a variety of conventional atmospheric pressure (AP) surface sampling methods and ionization techniques. On the other hand, Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) is a powerful technique that can be used at AP for nanoscale morphological and physical property measurements but one of its greatest drawbacks is that it has been chemically blind. Our proposal will bridge this divide by implementing and commercializing the combination of AFM (with its nanoscale topography and physical property measurements) with the definitive elemental and molecular characterization capabilities of MS. This project aims to develop and commercialize a new form of nanoscale mass spectrometry (MS) imaging based on AFM. Specifically, this project will demonstrate the feasibility of AFM- MS to improve the spatial resolution by 100X over conventional MS imaging technologies while also demonstrating the ability for an AFM to co-register morphology information with the MS based chemical information from a sample. Anasys previously pioneered and successfully commercialized AFM based nanoscale IR spectroscopy also based on federal SBIR funding. We anticipate significant downstream benefits in broad areas of materials, pharmaceutical, and life sciences. Application areas include development of advanced pharmaceutics, polymer materials, Semiconductors and electronics, organic photovoltaic materials, automotive materials, materials for energy generation and storage, cell biology, and cancer research, for example.