Abstract
Direct measurements of the interaction forces between surfaces are critical to understand the aggregation-dispersion behaviour of colloidal particles in dispersed systems. The interaction forces between solid surfaces in solutions, therefore, have been measured in a large variety of systems over a past few decades. Recently, much effort has been paid to enable direct measurements of the surface forces between “soft” interface, which show large deformation in solutions such as oil droplets, bubbles, lipid layers and cell surfaces, adopting atomic force microscopy techniques. It is the purpose of this review to illustrate how the interactions between surfaces including such soft interfaces can be measured and to summarise the current literature describing such experiments.
