Theory of Electronic and Atomic Processes in Scanning Probe Microscopy

Abstract

A new epoch of surface science has been opened up by the remarkable progress in scanning probe microscopy [1]. Moreover novel research area of materials science, i.e., the science of nano-scale materials has been brought about thanks to the development of SPM. In spite of the rapid development in SPM as an experimental tool, however, a firm theoretical basis for it has not in general been fully established. It is only for the fundamental aspects of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), that present theoretical understanding of its mechanism seems to be satisfactory [2]. There still, however, remain various fundamental problems related to subtle tunneling processes in STM, though compared to these, the theoretical understanding of atomic force microscopy (AFM) has lagged far behind [3]. Although the recent rapid development of non-contact mode atomic force microscopy (nc-AFM) has achieved real atomic resolution [4–6], the mechanism ensuring this is unclear. One still does neither know the reason assuring atomic resolution of nc-AFM, nor the nature of the interaction force in the intermediate regime of the van der Waals and chemical region.