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Updated: Jun 28, 2026

All-electronic Nanosecond-resolved Scanning Tunneling Microscopy: Facilitating the Investigation of Single Dopant Charge Dynamics
Published on: January 19, 2018
Tip-induced reduction of the resonant tunneling current on semiconductor surfaces
Pavel Jelínek1, Martin Svec, Pablo Pou
1Institute of Physics, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Cukrovarnicka 10, Prague, Czech Republic. jelinekp@fzu.cz
Abstract:
We report scanning tunneling microscope measurements showing a substantial decrease of the current, almost to zero, on the Si(111)-(7x7) reconstruction in the near-to-contact region under low bias conditions. First principles simulations for the tip-sample interaction and transport calculations show that this effect is driven by the substantial local modification of the atomic and electronic structure of the surface. The chemical reactivity of the adatom dangling bond states that dominate the electronic density of states close to the Fermi level and their spatial localization result in a strong modification of the electronic current.
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