Tailoring nanostructures with a scanning tunneling microscope

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Abstract
The use of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) has become a powerful technique for getting information on the topography of a conducting or semiconducting surface as well as for performing local tunneling spectroscopy. But there is also an increasing interest to use this particular technique for the fabrication of nanostructures in a desired and well-controlled way. Such structures are valuable for the investigation of the physics in small dimensions as well as for the development of new devices that take advantage of quantum size effects. The analysis of the processes creating nanostructures can provide important information about different interactions between the tip, the sample and their surrounding. In this letter we present one of the mechanisms involved in the fabrication of such nanostructures on glassy metals. We investigated the response of different glassy metals to our fabrication process and compared it to the theoretical predictions derived from the solution of the thermal diffusion equation. Furthermore, we will show a method to analyze the fabrication process by measuring the current during the creation of the structures.

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