Interfacing A Nanonis Controller With A Scanning Tunneling Microscope

Abstract

Scanning Tunneling Microscopy is an important tool in the study of condensed matter physics and has been aided by advances in computers. We obtained four Nanonis scanning tunneling microscope controllers to upgrade our current and new microscopes. The Nanonis hardware and software was designed to work with most scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopes. It has the ability to record multiple analog signals, transform and output similar signals, control piezoelectric motors, and monitor tip movement with a real-time operating system to provide necessary tip movements. The upgrade will afford us with more detailed scanning tools without sacrificing speed, as well as bring the benefits of newer hardware and support. We designed and built a software interface to complement the Nanonis hardware by providing a set workflow with new safety checks and to expose the additional functionality with a useful interface that fits our system. The scalable nature of our software will let us add new kinds of spectroscopic mapping that were unavailable to us in our older control system. Our current upgrade allows for more segmented energy ranges for bias spectrography scans to allow us to target areas of interest for more relevant data in less time. We discuss the structure of the underlying software and the hardware functionality and limits.