Study of Metal Surfaces and Clusters by Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

While the field of STM has experienced explosive growth in recent years, metals has not been studied by many groups, perhaps due to requirements of higher lateral and vertical resolution for atomic imaging. In this talk, the reconstructions of Au and Ni surfaces will be discussed. The correlation between the tunneling tip geometry, observed by FIM, and the resultant STM image leads to an operational definition of STM resolution. Recent microscopic and spectroscopic study of Si clusters will be compared with other experimental results.