Image Contrast Inversion of a Solvent Cast SEBS Film

The image contrast inversion was investigated in detail when soft polymeric materials were imaged with tapping mode atomic force microscopy （TM-AFM）. Solvent cast film of polystyrene-block-poly（ethylene/butylene）block-polystyrene （SEBS） triblock copolymers was used as a model system in this study, which showed phase separation domains with a size of several tens of nanometers. AFM contrast reversal process, through positive image, to an intermediary and till negative image, could be clearly seen in height images of the soft block copolymer using different tapping force. The higher tapping force would lead to not only contrast inversion, but also the different size of the microdomains and different roughness of the images. Moreover, contrast inversion was explained on the basis of attractive and repulsive contributions to the tip-sample interaction and indentation of the soft domains.

Multi-Frequency Contrast Source Inversion for Reflection Seismic Data

In the contrast source inversion(CSI)method,the contrast sources(equiva-lent scattering sources)and the contrast(parameter perturbation)are iteratively recon-structed by an alternating optimization scheme.Traditionally integral equation CSI method is formulated for transmission tomography using analytic Green’s function in homogeneous background.To extend the method to the case of reflection seismology,in this paper,we use WKBJ method to compute the Green’s function of depth dependent background media and the solving method of equations to initialize the contrast source of different frequencies,resulting in an efficient method to invert multi-frequency reflection seismic data–multi-frequency contrast source inversion method(MFCSI).Numerical results for the Marmousi model show that MFCSI method can obtain good results even when low frequency data are missing,in which case the conventional FWI fails.

Three-dimensional Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin approach for the simulation of scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy

We review the recently dew, loped three-dinmnsional （3D） atom-superposition approach for simulating scanning tunneling microscopy （STM） and spectroscopy （STS） based on ab initio electronic structure data. In the method, contributions from individual electron tunneling transitions between the tip apex atom and each of the sample surface atoms are summed up assuming tile one-dimensional （1D） Wentzel-Kramers--Brillouin （WKB） approximation in all these transitions. This 3D WKB tun- neling model is extremely suitable to simulate spin-polarized STM and STS on surfaces exhibiting a complex noncollinear magnetic structure, i.e., without a global spin quantization axis, at very low computational cost. The tip electronic structure from first principles can also be incorporated into the model, that is often assumed to be constant in energy in the vast majority of the related literature, which couht lead to a misinterpretation of experimental findings. Using this approach,we highlight some of tile electron tunneling features on a prototype frustrated hexagonal antiferro- magnetic Cr monolayer oil Ag（lll） surface. We obtain useful theoretical insights into tile simulated quantities that is expected to help the correct evaluation of experimental results. By extending the method to incorporate a simple orbital dependent electron tunneling transmission, we reinvestigate the bias voltage- and tip-dependent contrast inversion effect on the W（110） surface. STM images cal- culated using this orbital dependent model agree reasonably well with Tersoff-Hamann and Bardeen results. The computational efficiency of the model is remarkable as the k-point samplings of the surface and tip Brillouin zones do not affect the computational time, in contrast to the Bardeen method. In a certain case we obtain a relative computational time gain of 8500 compared to the Bardeen calculation, without the loss of quality. We discuss the advantages and limitations of tile 3D WKB method, and show further ways to improve and extend it.