Speeding Up STM Imaging

Roland Piquepaille writes "Probably not many of you have used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the essential tool of nanoscience. And you might think that it's as easy to take a picture of an atom with an STM as it is to take a shot with your digital camera. In fact, the imaging of individual atoms with an STM is quite slow. Now researchers at Cornell University have shown how to accelerate this process — by adding a radio transmitter, they are able to speed up atomic-level microscopy by a factor of at least 100. A typical STM currently has a sampling rate of about one KHz. This new radio-frequency STM can operate a thousand times faster."

I had to laugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not many of you have used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the essential tool of nanoscience

Wow, this guy must be psychic!

Re:I had to laugh

[ParaShoot]

Wow, this guy must be psychotic!

Fixed.

Wait a bit

[AlphaLop]

Don't buy one now though, because a model with double the features will be out in 6 months for less $$$ ;)

Re:Building a STM

[jamesh]

And you might think that it's as easy to take a picture of an atom with an STM as it is to take a shot with your digital camera.

has a dumberer sentence ever been uttered in a /. submission?

I don't think so. The last picture I took with my digital camera had billions of atoms captured. If an STM can only capture a few at a time then it has a lot of catching up to do!