Speeding Up STM Imaging 44
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."
Building a STM (Score:5, Interesting)
You might be surprised [slashdot.org].
Fabulous STM photos (Score:5, Interesting)
STM Image Gallery
http://www.almaden.ibm.com/vis/stm/gallery.html [ibm.com]
Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Essential? Bah! I work in a nanotech lab, and we don't have a STM!
We do have a brand new AFM [wikipedia.org], though, and it is kinda sluggish. I wonder if this technique would speed up that.