New view from a cold STM

Abstract

A study is conducted to see how cryogenic scanning tunneling microscopy can be used to uncover 'hidden' nanometer-scale physics and how they can be used to fabricate and probe the properties of novel nanometer-scale structures. As an example, measurements which reveal the spatial structure of the bound state excitation surrounding a magnetic adatom on the surface of a superconductor. The state density was found to decay on a length scale short compared to the superconductor's coherence length and in the case of a 4f adatom, to have a complex spatial structure. An asymmetry between the hole-like and particle-like excitation state density spectrum was also observed.