Positioning single atoms with a scanning tunnelling microscope

  title={Positioning single atoms with a scanning tunnelling microscope},
  author={Donald Eigler and Erich Schweizer},
SINCE its invention in the early 1980s by Binnig and Rohrer1,2, the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) has provided images of surfaces and adsorbed atoms and molecules with unprecedented resolution. The STM has also been used to modify surfaces, for example by locally pinning molecules to a surface3 and by transfer of an atom from the STM tip to the surface4. Here we report the use of the STM at low temperatures (4 K) to position individual xenon atoms on a single-crystal nickel surface with… 
An atomic switch realized with the scanning tunnelling microscope
THE scanning tunnelling microscope1 (STM) has been employed in recent years in attempts to develop atomic-scale electronic devices, both by examining device-like characteristics in preexisting
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A general method of manipulating adsorbed atoms and molecules on room-temperature surfaces with the use of a scanning tunneling microscope is described, and cesium structures from one nanometer to a few tens of nanometers across have been created on the surfaces of gallium arsenide and indium antimonide.
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THE tunnel diode1, which is widely used in high-speed electronics applications2, depends on the property of negative differential conductivity, that is, a negative slope in the current–voltage curve.
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scanning tunneling microscopy and scanning tunneling spectroscopy are shown that the current-voltage characteristics of a diode configuration consisting of an STM tip over specific sites of a boron-exposed silicon(111) surface exhibit NDR.
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We report on the first successful tunneling experiment with an externally and reproducibly adjustable vacuum gap. The observation of vacuum tunneling is established by the exponential dependence of