NANOSCALE SURFACE SCIENCE LABORATORY

Home-built scanning tunneling microscope (STM)

The scanning tunneling microscope (STM) has made a tremendous impact on various fields such as science, semiconductor physics, superconductivity, and surface chemistry. Its invention by Gerd Binning and Heinrich Rohrer (at IBM Zurich) provided the first three-dimensional real space images of surfaces at atomic resolution which are capable of representing surface topography, electronic structure, and other local properties.

Figure 1: A schematic diagram of the scanning tunneling microscope

Figure 1: A schematic diagram of the scanning tunneling microscope

We constructed a compact low temperature scanning tunneling microscope (LT-STM) having in-situ sample preparation capability (J. Kim et al. Rev. Sci. Instrum. 86, 093707 (2015)). The STM head is based on Pan-type design. Tip and sample exchanges can be done in-situ. The in-situ sample preparation chamber was designed to be compact allowing quick transfer of samples to the STM stage, which is ideal for preparing temperature sensitive samples.

Figure 2: Home-built Low Temperature STM

Figure 3: Home-built STM head