We have grown epitaxial single-crystal magnetotunnel junctions using Fe~001! substrates, MgO~001! spacers and Fe top electrodes. We have used scanning tunneling microscopy and atomic force microscopy to measure the tunneling characteristics as a function of position and demonstrated that local tunneling can be obtained such that the buried MgO can be characterized with nm resolution. Local I(V)...

We present a brief history of the development of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). These microscopes, developed in 1981 by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer (Nobel prize 1986), are capable of imaging and manipulating at an atomic level. STMs, and the group of instruments corporately referred to as scanning probe microscopes that evolved from them, are part of the instrumentation that has enabl...

Anyons are exotic quasiparticles with fractional charge that can emerge as fundamental excitations of strongly interacting topological quantum phases of matter. Unlike ordinary fermions and bosons, they may obey non-Abelian statistics—a property that would help realize fault-tolerant quantum computation. NonAbelian anyons have long been predicted to occur in the fractional quantum Hall (FQH) ph...

Using quantum tunneling of electrons into vibrating surface atoms, phonon oscillations can be observed on the atomic scale. Phonon interference patterns with unusually large signal amplitudes have been revealed by scanning tunneling microscopy in intercalated van der Waals heterostructures. Our results show that the effective radius of these phonon quasi-bound states, the real-space distributio...

Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), with surface sensitivity, is an ideal tool to probe the intriguing properties of the surface state of topological insulators (TIs) and topological crystalline insulators (TCIs). We summarize the recent progress on those topological phases revealed by STM studies. STM observations have directly confirmed the existence of the topological surface states and cle...