  Although stiction is a cumbersome problem for microsystems, it stimulates
investigations of surface adhesion. In fact, the shape of an adhered cantilever
carries information of the adhesion energy that locks one end to the substrate.
We demonstrate here that the system is also sensitive to the dispersion forces
that are operative very close to the point of contact, but their contribution
to the shape is maximum at about one third of the unadhered length. When the
force exceeds a critical value the cantilever does not lose stability but it
settles at smaller unadhered length, whose relation to adhesion energy is only
slightly affected by the force. Our calculations suggest to use adhered
cantilevers to measure the dispersion forces at short separations, where other
methods suffer from jump-to-contact instability. Simultaneous measurement of
the force and adhesion energy allows the separation of the dispersion
contribution to the surface adhesion.
