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Updated: Apr 11, 2026

Electrochemical Etching and Characterization of Sharp Field Emission Points for Electron Impact Ionization
Published on: July 12, 2016
Light emission from Ag(111) driven by inelastic tunneling in the field emission regime
Jesús Martínez-Blanco1, Stefan Fölsch
1Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik, Hausvogteiplatz 5-7, 10117, Berlin, Germany.
Abstract:
We study the light emission from a Ag(111) surface when the bias voltage on a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) junction is ramped into the field emission regime. Above the vacuum level, scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) shows a series of well defined resonances associated with the image states of the surface, which are Stark shifted due to the electric field provided by the STM tip. We present photon-energy resolved measurements that unambiguously show that the mechanism for light emission is the radiative decay of surface localized plasmons excited by the electrons that tunnel inelastically into the Stark shifted image states. Our work illustrates the effect of the tip radius both in the STS spectrum and the light emission maps by repeating the experiment with different tips.
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