Binnig & Rohrer, Paper 9 (Europhysics Letters):
By the time of the following publication (written with Fuchs, Gerber,
Stoll, and Tosatti, submitted in September 1995 and published in early
1986) confidence was very high. In the meantime, other laboratories had
reported success with STMs. And Binnig and Rohrer now had a pocket-size
STM. It was incorporated into a scanning-electron/scanning-Auger microscope.
The paper compared the actual measurements of graphite with a theoretical
model devised by Tersoff and Hamann. Graphite was useful for the purpose,
they argued, because it has an easily calculable electronic structure
and because graphite as a semi-metal exhibits no reconstruction problems.
It was also purchaseable off the shelf (Union Carbide Corp., product code
401A). The match between measurement and theory was good.
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[Graphite: measurement and model]. This paper also provided a further
understanding of the STM in the sense of helping others to get replicable
results. There is a graph showing how the corrugation becomes less
pronounced with increased voltage, due to the dependence of the
corrugation upon local density of states. Importantly, only the
amplitude of the corrugation is affected. This was a very strong
argument (was everyone convinced?) that the corrugation reveals
the topography of the surface.
Do you have an insight into reactions to such arguments? Do
let us know.
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This page was last updated on 15 May 2001 by Arne
Hessenbruch.
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