Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
Surface diffusion studies on single adsorbed entities, the focus of our presentation, had to await the development of techniques capable of revealing atoms. This was first accomplished by Müller roughly fifty years ago in 1956, with his invention of the field ion microscope (FIM). The natural extension of FIM was the development of the Atom Probe which allowed identification of chemical identities and control of composition for surfaces, but there also were earlier investigative methods, such as field emission microscopy, helium scattering, contact potential measurements and so on, which provided useful information about surface diffusion. Today there are newer techniques that have been shown to have the capability of revealing atoms. The scanning tunneling microscope (STM), devised by Binnig and Rohrer in 1983 is one of them. Less frequently used techniques, such as measurements of work function changes, perturbed angular correlation, or atomic beam scattering will also be mentioned, if only very briefly. Insights into diffusion phenomena on the atomic scale gained with the scanning tunneling microscope are certain to grow in number and importance. Both field ion and scanning tunneling microscopy have been covered extensively in the literature, and will also be described here in reference to diffusion studies. It should be noted that for examination of diffusion phenomena on clean surfaces by any of these techniques, good vacuum conditions are crucial.
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