A study on the nanometer grid method with the scanning tunneling microscope
- Technical University of Clausthal, Institute für Maschinenwesen (Germany)
- Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing Opening Laboratory of Vacuum Physics (China)
Conclusions1.The sensitivity of this method to displacements is determined by the STM to be about 0.1 Å. This implies that the minimum resolvable strain over a 200 Å field would be about 500 με.2.The critical factors to control in order to minimize image distortion are tip drift, flatness and parallelism of the sample surface, and nonlinearity, hysteresis, and creep of the piezoelectric actuators of the STM. In our tests, the distortion correction method reported in Ref. (3) was adopted, and the resulting distortion error was negligible.3.The results as reported above were repeatable under the stated experimental conditions.4.Large residual deformations are produced both by irradiating HOPG with a YAG laser and by cutting atomic-scale grooves in Si (111) 7×7.The present experimental results show that nanometer-scale deformation measurement with the grid method under STM is feasible, and we anticipate additional applications in the future. A real-time measuring system is under study that would allow application of mechanical loads to specimens in the STM, to investigate constitute relations in nanometer-scale.
- OSTI ID:
- 22771633
- Journal Information:
- Experimental Techniques, Vol. 22, Issue 4; Other Information: Copyright (c) 1998 Society for Experimental Mechanics, Inc.; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0732-8818
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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