AVS 58th Annual International Symposium and Exhibition
    Nanometer-scale Science and Technology Division Tuesday Sessions
       Session NS+AS-TuA

Invited Paper NS+AS-TuA8
2011 AVS Medard Welch Award Lecture - Inelastic Electron Tunneling Spectroscopy and Imaging of Single Molecules

Tuesday, November 1, 2011, 4:20 pm, Room 203

Session: Frontiers in Nanoscale Imaging and Characterization
Presenter: Wilson Ho, University of California, Irvine
Correspondent: Click to Email
The transformation of matter invariably involves energy transfer and redistribution. By probing matter and its coupling to external perturbations at the atomic scale with the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), it is possible to gain a broad range of new knowledge that would be difficult to achieve by other techniques. Through high precision measurements of inelastic phenomena inside single molecules with the STM, chemical and physical properties of molecules are obtained by probing their response to electrons, photons, and an external magnetic field. The STM is used to measure the electronic and vibronic states, vibrational and spin excitations, and optical transitions in single molecules. New features emerge when measurements are carried out at increasingly extreme conditions of vacuum, temperature, magnetic field, and pulse duration of light while maintaining the atomic-scale spatial resolution. The inelastic processes can result in nuclear motions such as molecular rotation, diffusion, conformational change, bond dissociation, and bond formation. By studying a wide range of systems from atomic hydrogen to large molecules such as metal porphyrins and phthalocyanines on metal and thin oxide surfaces, the new knowledge obtained by the STM can be applied to the understanding and advancement of numerous technologies such as chemical catalysis, information storage, nanophotonics, alternative energies, and environmental remediation. Underlying these longer range applications is the immediate gain in the fundamental scientific understanding of matter that can be derived from these studies.