Dear Mike,

Thank you for your reply, the book was splendid as I obtained several information on these parameters. I have applied deconvolution on the surface to prevent errors on parametric estimation on the material; the material is actually very smooth, as it is a nanomaterial coating. Is there any way to measure how curved or sharp the surface is (i.e., wavy or spiked)? None of the parameters are helping me quantify how sharp or blunt he nanoscale surface is.

Jopeth, instead of or in addtion to AFM, I would suggest to use non-specular X-ray scattering. With those kind of experiments, you may exactly get the skewness and the lateral as wenn as vertical correlation length scales of your samples. Check e.g. the book from Pietsch, Holy and Baumbach in Springer Tracts in Modern Physics (http://www.springer.com/gb/book/9780387400921) - attached please find the table of contents. In the second half of this book, you may find a lot of examples and see the results obtained.

hope this helps, Dirk

I think F1 button (help) may explain how your software works. Anyway I put PDF with part of help of Nanoscope software.

Taking into consideration my situation (many of old people, Poland, habits) if I have to measure roughness I using only three (from old PL standards) parameters: Ra, Rz, Rmax.

Hope it helps.

Gwyddion documentation has a nice descriptions

http://gwyddion.net/documentation/user-guide-en/roughness-iso.html

http://gwyddion.net/presentations/talk-roughness-David-Necas-2012.pdf

 To summarize a bit, here's what I understood (please correct me if i'm wrong):

1) Average and Root mean square, and Ten point height roughness are all parameters on the mean surface roughness on different standards. However they have different inclinations, either on the values' sensitivity on peaks and valleys or height variations.

2)Surface skewness and coefficient of kurtosis tells us the general topology of the surface. For positive skewness, asperities are formed while for negative skewness, valleys are formed. Kurtosis values tells how sharp (k>3) or blunt (k

I can also suggest site of Image Metrology company (well known SPIP soft), where you can find full description of much more than ten parameters of surface characterization.

actually, the SPIP list with definbitions is great and I lways use it for my personal purposes. However, it is somewhat difficult to format that in paper citations, and readers tend to underestimate its reliability. They believe more in research (or review) article citations. However, over te years I couldn't find a single comprehensive paper about that. Thus, what I usually do, I cite the book listed in SPIP page referecnes as [6], namely:

https://www.elsevier.com/books/development-of-methods-for-characterisation-of-roughness-in-three-dimensions/stout/978-1-85718-023-7

In fact, I don't have it at hands, yet I suppose that everything is also included in there. Does anyone have it in file?

That would help to check the contents.