2 ms·
I worked with a simple STM in a lab exercise. At the beginning, we created a new, clean tip. Guess how we did that?... We cut a piece of ordinary steel wire di
by ahartmetz 6y ago
I worked with a simple STM in a lab exercise. At the beginning, we created a new, clean tip. Guess how we did that?...
We cut a piece of ordinary steel wire diagonally with an ordinary wire cutter. Somehow we did it right - the first one worked. It was all somewhat fiddly and sometimes the image was noisy. But we did get images of atoms.
- anitil 6y agoThis reminded me of a Thunderf00t video where he created tiny jets for ammonia. I expected it would be some expensive procedure, but he just heated up some glass, stretched it and cracked it. Not every one worked, but it was surprising how mundane some super precise tooling can be
- regularfry 6y agoIf your process can be "make a tonne of low-precision instances then screen for accuracy" you can get surprisingly good results in general, as long as the accuracy of each instance is relatively uncorrelated. It's a really handy pattern to have in your back pocket.
- oasisbob 6y agoI haven't thought about tips in a while... definitely part of the "magic" of STM. Cutting a wire under tension sounds like it was a pretty common technique, it's the one my lab was using too. If the imaging just wasn't happening, it was common to goose the bias voltage (10x) for a split second in hopes of perturbing the tip enough to get things to go.