Significant IR-absorbance is detected over the whole image except for the crystal defects seen in topography and phase, which did not show IR absorbance at the absorbance maximum at 1720 cm -1 (figure ). The IR-map in a smaller 500 nm scale shows slight variations in IR intensity, the associated topography and phase images are shown in Supplementary information(figure ). To ascertain whether the topography correlates with the coincidentally recorded IR absorbance, the data point maps were analysed statistically. figure represents After PEG blocking, AFM-IR Point spectra were found to vary locally on Au(111)/PEG-C9t with two major types of spectra (figure a & b). One major difference in the local spectra was found to be the appearance of a broad absorbance between 1520 cm -1 to 1750 cm -1