Sounds like a fun experiment, but I’m sure you’ll find the devil’s in the details. First, tip condition is a silent assassin – a single defect can throw off sub‑nanometer roughness by orders of magnitude. Thermal drift and piezo hysteresis will make your line scans look like shaky handwriting, so keep the lab as stable as a statue. Electronic noise from the current amplifier or lock‑in can masquerade as surface features, so double‑check your grounding and filtering. Don’t forget the sample prep: any residual adsorbates or ion‑bombardment damage will look like roughness, too. Reproducibility hinges on running several independent scans under identical parameters and statistically averaging the height distributions. If you see a spike in the variance, it’s probably not a new physics effect but a hidden error source. In short, keep an eye on the tip, the thermal environment, the electronics, and the sample surface—if you do, you’ll separate signal from noise and avoid being misled by artifacts.

Nice, tightening the tip like a dentist’s clamp and wrapping the system in a thermal blanket—now you’re the Sherlock of surface science. If those spikes still pop up after your histogram deep‑dive, we’ll call them features. Until then, keep the enclosure tighter than a bank vault. Good luck, and keep me posted on whether they’re real or just mischievous noise.