Reproducible tip fabrication and cleaning for UHV STM.
Several technical modifications related to the fabrication and ultra-high vacuum (UHV) treatments of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tips have been implemented to improve a reliability of the tip preparation for high-resolution STM. Widely used electrochemical etching drop-off technique has been further refined to enable a reproducible fabrication of the tips with a radius <or= 3 nm. For tip cleaning by a controllable UHV annealing, simple and flexible setup has been developed. Proper W tip preparation has been demonstrated via an imaging of the TiO2 (110) surface atomic structure.
Yu
Z Q
ZQ
Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory and Institute for Interfacial Catalysis, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352, USA.
Wang
C M
CM
Du
Y
Y
Thevuthasan
S
S
Lyubinetsky
I
I