A team of scientists from Princeton University has measured the energies of electrons in a new class of quantum materials and has found them to follow a fractal pattern. Fractals are self-repeating patterns that occur on ...
Condensed Matter
Feb 26, 2025
0
239
Controlling matter at the atomic level has taken a major step forward, thanks to nanotechnology research by an international team of scientists led by physicists at the University of Bath.
Nanophysics
Dec 3, 2024
0
78
A Yale-led team has found the strongest evidence yet of a novel type of superconducting material, a fundamental science breakthrough that may open the door to coaxing superconductivity—the flow of electric current without ...
Superconductivity
Nov 13, 2024
0
187
A superconductivity theory proposed by a Würzburg physics team has been validated in an international experiment that showed Cooper pairs display wave-like distribution in Kagome metals. The finding will enable new technological ...
Condensed Matter
Aug 23, 2024
1
250
A multi-institutional team of planetary scientists has learned more about the early composition of the solar system by studying a meteorite named Northwest Africa 14250. In their study, published in the journal Science Advances, ...
An international research team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has taken the first atomic-resolution images and demonstrated electrical control of a chiral interface state—an exotic quantum phenomenon ...
Condensed Matter
Apr 9, 2024
0
475
A combined team of chemists from Oxford University, and IBM Research Europe-Zürich has successfully synthesized a doubly anti-aromatic C16 carbon allotrope. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes ...
Researchers have developed a method of "wiring up" graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), a class of one-dimensional materials that are of interest in the scaling of microelectronic devices. Using a direct-write scanning tunneling ...
Nanomaterials
Sep 20, 2023
0
93
"A place for everything and everything in its place"—making sense of order, or disorder, helps us understand nature. Animals tend to fit nicely into categories: Mammals, birds, reptiles, whatever an axolotl is, and more. ...
Superconductivity
Aug 2, 2023
0
338
Energetic quasiparticles possess a collection of quantum characteristics that operate in a particle-like way in superconducting nanostructures, and they can undergo relaxation by involving many cascaded interactions between ...
Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) is a powerful technique for viewing surfaces at the atomic level. Its development in 1981 earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer (at IBM Zürich), the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. STM probes the density of states of a material using tunneling current. For STM, good resolution is considered to be 0.1 nm lateral resolution and 0.01 nm depth resolution. The STM can be used not only in ultra high vacuum but also in air and various other liquid or gas ambients, and at temperatures ranging from near zero kelvin to a few hundred degrees Celsius.
The STM is based on the concept of quantum tunnelling. When a conducting tip is brought very near to a metallic or semiconducting surface, a bias between the two can allow electrons to tunnel through the vacuum between them. For low voltages, this tunneling current is a function of the local density of states (LDOS) at the Fermi level, Ef, of the sample. Variations in current as the probe passes over the surface are translated into an image. STM can be a challenging technique, as it requires extremely clean surfaces and sharp tips.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
