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The invention of the scanning tunneling microscope in 1982 initiated the creation of what is known today as a whole family of scanning probe microscopies (SPMs). The importance of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) was soon recognized and culminated in the award of half the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics to Binnig and Rohrer. Early STM work focused mainly
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Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) employs a biased sharp metal probe in close proximity to a surface. When the tip-sample separation is small, there is a finite probability that electrons will tunnel across this gap. As the tip is scanned across the sample the tunneling current is utilized as a feedback signal in order to maintain the tip-sample separation