Detecting and localizing surface dynamics with STM: a study of the Sn/Ge(111) and Sn/Si(111) α-phase surfaces

After almost three decades since the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) its application to the study of dynamic processes at surfaces is attracting a great deal of interest due to its unique capacity to observe such processes at the atomic level. The α-phase of group IV adatoms on Ge(111) and Si(111) is the ideal playground for the analysis of critical phenomena and represents a prototype of a two-dimensional electron system exhibiting thermally activated peculiar Sn adatom dynamics. This paper will relate the study of adatom dynamics at the α-Sn/Ge(111) and α-Sn/Si(111) surfaces, discussing in detail the methods we used for such kinds of time-resolved measurements. The microscope tip was used to record the tunnelling current on top of an oscillating Sn adatom, keeping the feedback loop turned off. The dynamics of the adatoms is detected as telegraph noise present in the tunnelling versus time curves. With this method it is possible to increase the acquisition rate to the actual limit of the instrument electronics, excluding piezo movement and feedback circuitry response time. We put emphasis on the statistical data analysis which allows the localization of the sample areas that are involved in dynamical processes.