In situ manipulation of scanning tunneling microscope tips without tip holder

Reproducible Fabrication of Scanning Tunneling Microscope Tips

Reproducible fabrication of Scanning Tunneling Microscope tips is carried out following an electrochemical procedure widely reported. Tips are made from 0.5 diameter tungsten wire. Controlling fabrication parameters (immersion in the electrochemical solution, current-voltage ranges, duration of the process, among others) we achieve aspect ratios of 0.68 and tip radii of 330 nm in the best case....

Variable-temperature independently driven four-tip scanning tunneling microscope.

The authors have developed an ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) variable-temperature four-tip scanning tunneling microscope (STM), operating from room temperature down to 7 K, combined with a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Four STM tips are mechanically and electrically independent and capable of positioning in arbitrary configurations in nanometer precision. An integrated controller system for both ...

Atomic and molecular manipulation with the scanning tunneling microscope.

The prospect of manipulating matter on the atomic scale has fascinated scientists for decades. This fascination may be motivated by scientific and technological opportunities, or from a curiosity about the consequences of being able to place atoms in a particular location. Advances in scanning tunneling microscopy have made this prospect a reality; single atoms can be placed at selected positio...

Vacuum tunneling of superconducting quasiparticles from atomically sharp scanning tunneling microscope tips

We report on the study of atomically sharp superconducting tips for scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. The results clearly show vacuum tunneling of superconducting quasiparticles from atomically sharp tips. Observed deviations of the energy gap of the superconducting tip from its bulk value are attributed to the proximity effect. We show that a combination of a superconducting tip ...

Simulating Scanning Tunneling Microscope