AVS 60th International Symposium and Exhibition
    Scanning Probe Microscopy Focus Topic Thursday Sessions
       Session SP+AS+BI+MI+NS+SS-ThM

Invited Paper SP+AS+BI+MI+NS+SS-ThM1
Inelastic Imaging of Single Molecule Dynamics

Thursday, October 31, 2013, 8:00 am, Room 202 C

Session: Advances in Scanning Probe Imaging
Presenter: W. Ho, University of California, Irvine
Correspondent: Click to Email
A greater part of chemistry is designed to probe the encounter of reactants to form products through a sequence of reaction steps that involve reaction complexes as intermediates. The detection of these complexes is an important step to reveal the reaction mechanisms and advance our understanding and control of chemistry. While sophisticated spectroscopic techniques have been developed to provide properties of the complexes in the energetic and temporal domains, much less is known about the spatial properties. Advances made over the last 15 years in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) have led to direct characterization and imaging of reaction complexes that are formed by controlled manipulation of the reacting molecules to separate from each other at distances from non-interaction to those approaching the transition state. Changes in their vibrational properties can be monitored as a function of the spatial separation by inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy (IETS) with the STM. Both spectroscopic information (vibrational energies, intensities, and lineshapes) and inelastic images can be obtained by STM-IETS. These results provide sub-THz spectral characterization and spatial visualization of chemical reactions with sub-Angstrom spatial resolution.