2008 Volume 36 Issue 2 Pages 87-92
Scanning viscoelasticity microscopy (SVM) with a mechanical model analysis was applied to polystyrene (PS) surfaces. When the surface was in a glassy state, that is, in an elastic regime, the SVM vibrational system can be simply expressed by a series model composed of two springs such as a cantilever and the sample surface. Once the surface reaches in a viscoelastic regime, a damping factor must be incorporated into the model surface. The spring constants for the PS surfaces being in glassy and transition states were successfully extracted by the analysis. The surface value even for the glassy state was lower than the corresponding bulk value by a few decades.