A WALKING, SCANNING TUNNELING MICROSCOPE COMBINED WITH A FOCUSED ION BEAM

A walking, concentric-tube STM has been designed to interface with an FIB. The outer tube, which stands upright on 3 spherical feet, supports the inner tube and serves as an inertial stepper, allowing the STM to move laterally relative to a sample. The ion beam can pass down through the center of the inner tube, which operates as a conventional tube scanner with the STM tip at its lower end. The STM walks distances of mm with µm-scale resolution, resolves the pyrolytic graphite lattice, and can image regions of up to 3.5 x 3.5 µm