Iterative Decoupling Method for High-Precision Imaging of Complex Surfaces

Abstract: Nonlinear systems and interaction forces are pervasive in many scientific fields, such as nanoscale metrology and materials science, but their accurate identification is challenging due to their complex behaviour and inaccessibility of measured domains. This problem intensifies for continuous systems undergoing distributed, coupled interactions, such as in the case of topography measurement systems, measuring narrow and deep grooves. Presented is a method to invert a set of nonlinear coupled equations, which can be functions of unknown distributed physical quantities. The method employs a successive approach to iteratively converge to the exact solution of the set of nonlinear equations. The latter utilizes an approximate yet invertible model providing an inexact solution, which is evaluated using the hard-to-invert exact model of the system. This method is applied to the problem of reconstructing the topography of surface contours using a thin and long vibrating fiber. In nanoscale metrology, measuring inaccessible deep and narrow grooves or steep walls becomes difficult and singular when attempting to extract distributed nonlinear interactions that depend on the topography. We verify our method numerically by simulating the Van der Waals (VdW) interaction forces between a nanofiber and a nanoscale deep groove, and experimentally by exploiting magnetic interactions between a magnetic topography and a vibrating, elastic beam. Our results validate the ability to accurately reconstruct the topography of normally inaccessible regions, making it a possible enhancement for traditional point based AFM measurements, as well as for other nonlinear inverse problems.