Researchers in academia and industry who are interested in techniques for measuring intermolecular forces will find this an essential text. It presents a review of modern force spectroscopy, including fundamentals of intermolecular forces, technical aspects of the force measurements, and practical applications. The handbook begins with a review of the fundamental physics of loading single and multiple chemical bonds on the nanometer scale. It contains a discussion of thermodynamic and kinetic models of binding forces and dissipation effects in nanoscale molecular contacts, covers practical...

Modern materials science and biophysics has increasingly focused on studying and controlling intermolecular interactions on the single-molecule level. The peer-reviewed literature contains an increasing number of studies that either measure the interaction forces directly or use mechanical forces to deform the molecules or trigger structural transitions. Molecular force spectroscopy is the result of unprecedented advances in the capabilities of modern force measurement instruments in the past decade and describes a number of techniques that use mechanical force measurements to study...