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When you want to see something small, you use an optical microscope; when you want to see something really small, you can use some form of electron microscope; when you want to "see" individual atoms or molecules, you break out the scanning probe microscopes. Scanning probe microscopes work by running a very sharp tip over a surface and forming the image of the surface from a signal read from the tip—akin to a record player reading the grooves on a record in order to play sound. The first of these microscopy techniques, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), was developed by IBM researchers in 1981 and resulted in its inventors receiving the Nobel Prize in physics a short five years later. STM relies on quantum mechanical tunneling effects; as the microscope's tip is scanned over a surface, electrons tunnel from the tip into the surface, the tunneling current is measured and can be transformed into an image.
Read the article here.
Read the article here.
