Editor's Summary

1 November 2007

STM now on radio

The scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) is one of the most useful tools in nanoscience. But a severe limitation of the technique is its time resolution. This is determined not by the fundamental physics of tunnelling, but by the limited high-frequency response of the conventional tunnel current read-out circuitry. The radio-frequency STM uses a specially designed radio-frequency measurement circuit to avoid these measurement bandwidth limitations and work reported in this issue shows that the 'RF-STM' can improve on time resolution by a factor of 100 compared to a state-of-the-art STM. Experimental demonstrations of the new fast-imaging instrument illustrate its suitability for three potential applications — fast surface topography, thermometry at the nanometre scale and nanomechanical displacement sensing.

Letter: Radio-frequency scanning tunnelling microscopy

U. Kemiktarak, T. Ndukum, K. C. Schwab & K. L. Ekinci

doi:10.1038/nature06238

First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (376K) | Supplementary information