Scanning tunneling microscope

Patent Pending A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is an instrument for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Its development in 1981 earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer (at IBM Zürich), the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986.[1][2] For an STM, good resolution is considered to be 0.1 nm lateral resolution and 0.01 nm depth resolution.[3] With this resolution, individual atoms within materials are routinely imaged and manipulated.