An extremely sharp conducting tip, often made of tungsten or platinum-iridium, is brought within a few angstroms to the sample surface. A bias voltage applied between the tip and the sample causes ...

The development of scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) in high magnetic fields has opened new avenues in nanoscale imaging and spectroscopy. By utilising quantum tunnelling in precisely engineered ...

This news release is available in German. Jülich, 27 November 2014 - The resolution of scanning tunnelling microscopes can be improved dramatically by attaching small molecules or atoms to their tip.

The demonstration relies on a quantum-mechanical effect known as inelastic tunnelling. (Courtesy: A Weismann/Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel) The sensitivity of a scanning-tunnelling microscope ...

At its core, SPM operates on the principle of measuring interactions between a sharp probe and the surface of a material. As the probe scans across the surface, it detects variations in physical ...

Scientists use scanning tunneling microscopy to understand how a material's electronic or magnetic properties relate to its structure on the atomic scale. When using this technique, however, they can ...

There are numerous examples in science in which a radically different conceptual approach to solving a problem at hand has resulted in a major scientific breakthrough. Such is the case for scanning ...

In the early 1980s, Gerd Binning and Heinrich Rohrer developed the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. In 1986, they won a Noble Prize for their breakthrough ...

Scanning Tunneling Microscopes (STMs) are amazing tools which can manipulate singular atoms, but they cannot characterize these atoms as they act only on the outer electron shell. Meanwhile X-ray ...

Chemistry live: using a scanning tunneling microscope, researchers were able for the very first time to witness in detail the activity of catalysts during an electrochemical reaction. The measurements ...

On August 10, 1982, IBM won US patent 4,343,993 for the invention of the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), the first microscope that allowed researchers to “see” at the atomic scale. The invention ...