Abstract

The scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is a powerful tool for studying various nanoscale materials with atomic scale spatial resolution. Despite the atom scale spatial sensitivity however, the STM lacks the chemical sensitivity crucial to the investigation of nanomaterials. Raman spectroscopy on the other hand has a very strong chemical sensitivity but its spatial resolution is highly restricted by the diffraction limit of light allowing only about several hundreds of nanometer resolution. Combining these two powerful experiments into a technique called STM-tip enhanced Raman spectroscopy (STM-TERS) alleviates the limitation of STM and Raman allowing for simultaneous subnanometer spatial resolution and high chemical sensitivity.

© 2019 Japan Society of Applied Physics, The Optical Society (OSA)