A Student-Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope

Many introductory and nanotechnology textbooks discuss the operation of various microscopes including atomic force (AFM), scanning tunneling (STM), and scanning electron microscopes (SEM). In a nanotechnology laboratory class, students frequently utilize microscopes to obtain data without a thought about the detailed operation of the tool itself. I wanted to give my students a deeper appreciation for the physics by having them build a simple scanning tunneling microscope. Initially, 15 hours of an upper-division laboratory class were devoted to building and operating the STM. As the build process was refined, the time commitment for this project has shrunk to nine hours. Using the method described in this paper, the project is now simple enough that it can be built and operated by students in the introductory class.