A team of researchers at the University of California with members also from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford University has succeeded in combining tunneling microscopy and infrared spectroscopy to gain a better understanding of how molecules behave when they stick to a surface. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team describes how they used a custom built laser to allow for performing infrared spectroscopy with scanning tunneling microscopy without heating its tip. Remote sensing of molecular vibrations with a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tip. Pechenezhskiy et al. illuminate molecules on a gold substrate by a tunable infrared laser. When the illumination is resonant with a particular vibrational mode, the excitation is transferred to the substrate. This, in turn, causes the surface to shake, which is detected by variations in the tunneling current through the STM tip. As the laser frequency is changed, the STM signal maps out the vibrational spectrum. Credit: APS/Alan Stonebraker Scanning tunneling microscopy is able to gather information at the atomic level of a material by making use of a tiny tip that is placed near a material and then measuring the amount of current that passes between the tip and the material.
The post Researchers devise means to combine scanning tunneling microscopy and infrared spectroscopy has been published on Technology Org.
Similar news or articles:
Comments