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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

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amelius·

Can you image non-conductive surfaces with this technique?

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Nope, the technique for that is an Atomic Force Microscopy[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_force_microscopy

And it turns out DIY atomic force microscopes are possible too! (e.g., [1]) It's probably less likely to get all the way to atomic resolution (0.01nm) like a scanning tunneling microscope, but atomic force microscopes can take many types of 1-to-1000nm-scale measurements and are often more practically useful.

[1] https://hackaday.com/2014/04/29/a-diy-atomic-force-microscop...

OR helium ion microscopy, but that is not as widely available afaik

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_helium_ion_microscope

Best you can do is gold plate the object you would like to scan. Sputter coating is the preferred method.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_electron_microscope#S...

That's for SEM. I've never heard of sputter coating used for STM.

You are right, I got those two methods mixed up. It looks like gold sputter coating would be a good solution for the home made tungsten STM tips mentioned in the link.

That’s a SEM which is significantly lower resolution, but lets you zoom in and out across a huge range.

STM on the other hand is for looking at individual atoms so coating a surface is just going to show that coating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope

Sort of?

STM is frequently used to characterize adsorbed molecular monolayers on a graphite substrate.

You're obviously depending on electron conduction to image the sample, but you can image all sorts of things which wouldn't be considered conductive as a bulk material.

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