| This second edition of the book Exploring Scanning Probe Microscopy with Mathematica is a revised and extended version of the first edition. It consists of a collection of self-contained, interactive, computational examples from the fields of scanning tunneling microscopy, scanning force microscopy, and related technologies, using Mathematica notebooks. It was written in Mathematica version 5.1 as a series of notebooks and was then translated into the TEX typesetting language. The software includes the code belonging to each chapter of the book. The files can be run independently of each other on any platform that supports Mathematica versions 5 and higher.
The main motivation for writing a book such as this arises from oftenencountered situations where published models in the field of scanning probe microscopy require prior knowledge of other theoretical results. The reader of such material, therefore, needs to track down other publications that sometimes use different notations. A self-consistent, self-contained presentation would therefore be a real time-saver. A second motivation is the time-consuming effort required to code models that contain subtleties that are not easy to spot. The code presented in this book, being self-contained, alleviates this problem. A third motivation is associated with the benefit of working interactively with a live mathematical model and being able to change the values of its parameters. The computational results, which might range over unanticipated values, could provide better insight into the intricacies of a given problem than, say, reading plain text and browsing through several examples. The advantage of this book is that it provides an active approach to the study of and research in scanning probe microscopy. |
