Atomic-Scale Imaging with the Scanning Tunneling Microscope

Abstract

Atomic-resolution techniques for surface characterization are often limited in their ability to probe individual atoms or molecules. In the last few years, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) has emerged as a powerful probe for studying the atomic-scale structure of surfaces. One of the greatest features of STM is that it is applicable to a wide variety of problems, restricted only by the condition that the material to be studied must be a conductor. Although STM has been applied to a wide variety of materials science problems, the greatest concentration of STM work has been in the study of semiconductor surfaces. This results not only because semiconductor surfaces exhibit complicated and interesting reconstructions of the atoms in the outermost surface layers, but also because many important properties of semiconductor surfaces and interfaces are dominated by defects and other surface imperfections with atomic dimensions.