Theory of a Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM)

[Logik]

Hi, for my integration class I am building a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM). I found some interesting designs and I choose the cheapest one (students are poor) witch uses a unimorph disk. Here is the STM design I plan to build: http://www.geocities.com/spm_stm/".

For my class I need to hand in a paper on the theory of how it works (tunnel effect) and actually do some experiments and analyse them. I doubt I will actually be able to analyse a sample but I will be able to do some data sampling and analyse other stuff has effect of temperature. So in this stage I am trying to find the more information I can on STM's, on anything related the tunnel effect and on environmental effects on the STM. If you know any good source information, know papers about it or have written about it please feel free to post links or information on how to obtain it. Also if you have idea of what I could measure (ex: tunnel voltage/temperature), please feel free to post your ideas.

If you have any other suggestions don't be shy, I am opened to anything. Also don't be scared of being too technical, I will figure it out or read around to understand it.

Thank you in advance.

P.S. I will also post in the design engineering section and in electrical engineering one for other questions. So if you are interested about other part or have a lot of knowledge on STM's you can go to the two other threads.
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=109369"
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=109375"

 

[inha]

You should probably search some journals for review articles on STM. Nucl. inst. meth. a. and rev. sci. inst. are focused on exprerimental methods. rev. mod. phys. is also useful as there has been a bunch of reviews of experimental techniques in it.

 

[Dr Transport]

Introduction to Scanning Tunneling Microscopy, C Julan Chen has all the basic theory.