Forcing surface issues

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Abstract
The landscape spreads before you as rolling hills, punctuated by occasional pits and holes, and leads westerly to a precipitous cliff. This scene usually resides in holiday photographs but it is now appearing in the laboratory too in images from atomic force microscopes. The imaged hills are really atomic steps and terraces, the pits are random atomic vacancies, and the cliff is a screw dislocation. What allows us to draw this analogy between the large and small scales of nature? In part, it is the modern techniques of graphics visualisation of data; but increasingly, it is the stunning resolution of atomic and molecular features that this class of microscope can produce. The excitement of studying the physics and chemistry of surfaces with the force microscopes is enhanced by the knowledge that the instruments are still in their infancies.

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