Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

Publication Title

Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology A

Volume

33

Issue

2

Pages

1-4

Publisher Name

AIP Publishing LLC

Abstract

An electrochemical method using pulsed alternating current etching (PACE) to produce atomically sharp scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) tips is presented. An Arduino Uno microcontroller was used to control the number and duration of the alternating current (AC) pulses, allowing for ready optimization of the procedures for both Pt:lr and W tips using a single apparatus. W tips prepared using constant and pulsed AC power were compared. Tips fashioned using PACE were sharper than those etched with continuous AC power alone. Pt:lr tips were prepared with an initial coarse etching stage using continuous AC power followed by fine etching using PACE. The number and potential of the finishing AC pulses was varied and scanning electron microscope imaging was used to compare the results. Finally, tip quality using the optimized procedures was verified by UHY-STM imaging. With PACE, at least 70% of the W tips and 80% of the Pt:lr tips were of sufficiently high quality to obtain atomically resolved images of HOPG or Ni(l 11 ).

Comments

Author Posting. © American Vacuum Society, 2015. This article is posted here by permission of the American Vacuum Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in the Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology A, Volume 33, Issue 2, 2015, http://dx.doi.org/10.1116/1.4904347

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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