Scanning Tunneling Microscope

Modern research microscopes bear less resemblance to the simple microscope described above than the Hubble telescope does to Newton’s first reflector telescope. In the research microscopes that can view and manipulate individual atoms, there are no lenses based on geometrical optics. Instead the surface to be studied is scanned, line by line, by a tiny probe whose operation is based on the particle-wave nature of electrons. An image of the surface is then reconstructed by computer and displayed on a computer screen. These microscopes work at a scale of distance much smaller than the wavelength of light, a distance scale where the approximations inherent in geometrical optics do not apply.