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The invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope by Binnig and Rohrer almost two decades ago revolutionised surface science. This instrument enables the visualisation of surfaces at the atomic scale and opened up an entirely new area of physics and technology: nanoscience (see Section 8). The animation is a simple illustration of the STM technique - a sharp (preferably atomically sharp!) tip is scanned back and forth across a surface, resolving the atomic structure. We will discuss the physics and applications of the STM and related scanning probe instruments in Section 7.


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