Bimodal atomic force microscopy is a force-microscopy method that requires the simultaneous excitation of two eigenmodes of the cantilever. This method enables the simultaneous recording of several material properties and, at the same time, it also increases the sensitivity of the microscope. Here we apply fractional calculus to express the frequency shift of the second eigenmode in terms of the fractional derivative of the interaction force. We show that this approximation is valid for situations in which the amplitude of the first mode is larger than the length of scale of the force, corresponding to the most common experimental case. We also show that this approximation is valid for very different types of tip-surface forces such as the Lennard-Jones and Derjaguin-Muller-Toporov forces.
Keywords: AFM; atomic force microscopy; bimodal AFM; frequency shift; integral calculus applications.