Review Article

Imaging, single atom contact and single atom manipulations at low temperature using the new ScientaOmicron LT-UHV-4 STM

¹ Nanoscience Group & MANA Satellite, CEMES/CNRS, 29 rue Marvig, BP 94347, 31055 Toulouse Cedex, France
² CEATech Midi-Pyrénées, Campus INSA, Bât. GM 135 avenue de Rangueil, 31400 Toulouse, France
³ Centre for Nanometer-Scale Science and Advanced Materials, NANOSAM, Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Applied Computer Science, Jagiellonian University, Lojasiewicza 11, 30-348 Krakow, Poland
⁴ International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan

^a e-mail: joachim@cemes.fr

Received: 25 September 2015
Revised: 8 December 2015
Accepted: 21 December 2015
Published online: 15 January 2016

Abstract

The performances of the new ScientaOmicron LT-UHV 4-STM microscope have been certified by a series of state-of-art STM experiments on an Au(1 1 1) surface at 4.3 K. During the STM operation of the 4 STM scanners (independently or in parallel with an inter tip apex front to front distance down to a few tens of nanometers), a ΔZ stability of about 2 pm per STM was demonstrated. With this LT-UHV 4-STM stability, single Au atom manipulation experiments were performed on Au(1 1 1) by recording the pulling, sliding and pushing manipulation signals per scanner. Jump to contact experiments lead to perfectly linear low voltage I-V characteristics on a contacted single Au ad-atom with no need of averaging successive I-V’s. Our results show how this new instrument is exactly 4 times a very precise single tip LT-UHV-STM. Two tips surface conductance measurements were performed on Au(1 1 1) using a lock-in technique in a floating sample mode of operation to capture the Au(1 1 1) surface states via two STM tips dI/dV characteristics.