Development of portable experimental set-up for AFM to work at cryogenic temperature

We report on the designing aspects and fabrication of low temperature atomic force microscope (AFM) to study the surface structures of nanomaterials. Several key features of design including liquid nitrogen reservoir, vacuum chamber, vibration isolation table etc. have been presented. The whole set up was assembled in-house at a fairly low cost to be used with any commercial AFM system. The surface morphology of important oxide (In0.94Sn0.04)2O3 (ITO) thin film nanostructures has been investigated using the cryogenic AFM set up.