Abstract
X-ray reflectivity and atomic force microscopy are two complementary tools in character-izing the surface morphology of a solid sample. However, the measured results reported by these two methods were usually not consistent. To understand this inconsistency, a possible interpretation for X-ray reflectivity and atomic force microscopy on the surface characteri-zation of a solid sample is described. The difference in these two methods is the X-ray beam covers a larger area of few mm 2 on the sample surface while the atomic force microscopy probes only a local area (around μm 2 ). The lateral resolution of X-ray reflectivity is about 0.1 nm depending on the wavelength of the X-ray source and while the AFM is limited by the dimension of the tip. In general, the surface roughness measured by AFM should be smoother than that obtained by X-ray reflectivity. However, the surface contamination com-plicates the measurements for both methods, especially, for these samples with roughness less than 1 nm. © 2012 The Physical Society of the Republic of China.