Scanning tunneling microscopy—from birth to adolescence

Abstract

We present here the historic development of Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM); the physical and technical aspects have already been covered in a few recent reviews and two conference proceedings' and many others are expected to follow in the near future. A technical summary is given by the sequence of figures, which stands alone. Our narrative is by no means a recommendation of how research should be done; it simply reflects what we thought, how we acted, and what we felt. However, it would certainly be gratifying if it encouraged a more relaxed attitude towards doing science. Perhaps we were fortunate in having common training in superconductivity, a field which radiates beauty and elegance. For scanning tunneling microscopy, we brought along some experience in tunneling (Binnig and Hoenig, 1978) and angstroms (Rohrer, 1960), but none in microscopy or surface science. This probably gave us the courage and lightheartedness to start something which should have worked in principle, as we were so often told. After havn on another occasion, I had been involved for a short time with tunneling between very small metallic grains in bistable resistors, and later I matched my colleagues struggle with tolerance problems in the fabrication of Josephson junctions. So the local study of growth and electrical properties of thin insulating layers appeared to me an interesting problem, and I was given the opportunity to hire a new research staff member, Gerd Binnig, who found it interesting, too, and accepted the offer. Incidentally, Gerd and I would have missed each other, had it not been for K. Alex Muller,