Role of Inelastic Tunneling through the Insulating Barrier in Scanning-Tunneling-Microscope Experiments on Cuprate Superconductors

Tunneling rates in electron transport through double-barrier molecular junctions in a scanning tunneling microscope.

The scanning tunneling microscope enables atomic-scale measurements of electron transport through individual molecules. Copper phthalocyanine and magnesium porphine molecules adsorbed on a thin oxide film grown on the NiAl(110) surface were probed. The single-molecule junctions contained two tunneling barriers, vacuum gap, and oxide film. Differential conductance spectroscopy shows that electro...

Simulating Scanning Tunneling Microscope

Theory of the scanning tunneling microscope.

We present a theory for tunneling between a real surface and a model probe tip, applicable to the recently developed "scanning tunneling microscope." The tunneling current is found to be proportional to the local density of states of the surface, at the position of the tip. The effective lateral resolution is related to the tip radius R and the vacuum gap distance d approximately as [(2 A)(R +d...

Title Origin of the checkerboard pattern in scanning tunneling microscopy maps of underdoped cuprate superconductors

Comparative studies of the scanning tunneling spectra in cuprate and iron-arsenide superconductors

We report scanning tunneling spectroscopic studies of cuprate and iron-arsenic superconductors, including YBa2Cu3O7− (Y-123, Tc = 93 K), Sr0.9La0.1CuO2 (La-112, Tc = 43 K), and the “122” compounds Ba(Fe1−xCox)2As2 (Co-122 with x = 0.06, 0.08, 0.12 for Tc = 14, 24, 20 K). In zero field (H = 0), spatially homogeneous coherence peaks at energies  = ±SC flanked by spectral “shoulders” at ±eff ...