Speeding Up STM Imaging · Slashdot Mirror

Posted by kdawson on Sunday November 11, 2007 @10:27PM from the ready-for-my-close-up-mr.-demille dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Probably not many of you have used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), the essential tool of nanoscience. And you might think that it's as easy to take a picture of an atom with an STM as it is to take a shot with your digital camera. In fact, the imaging of individual atoms with an STM is quite slow. Now researchers at Cornell University have shown how to accelerate this process — by adding a radio transmitter, they are able to speed up atomic-level microscopy by a factor of at least 100. A typical STM currently has a sampling rate of about one KHz. This new radio-frequency STM can operate a thousand times faster."

1 of 44 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Building a STM by Potor · 2007-11-11 23:48 · Score: 4, Insightful

And you might think that it's as easy to take a picture of an atom with an STM as it is to take a shot with your digital camera.
has a dumberer sentence ever been uttered in a /. submission?