Tunneling current between two nonplanar surfaces.

Abstract

The problem of determining the tunneling current between two electrodes that are nonplanar is essential to the theory of Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (S.T.M.) [1’10]. J. Tersoff and D. R. Hamann have shown that for a spherical tip as one electrode, and including only an evanescent s wave function, the current is proportional to the local density of states (LDOS) of the second electrode, at the Fermi level, evaluated at the center of the tip [1,2].