At its core, SPM operates on the principle of measuring interactions between a sharp probe and the surface of a material. As the probe scans across the surface, it detects variations in physical ...

In nanotechnology and molecular biology, researchers are often severely limited by the inability to observe atoms and molecules in three dimensions. Proteins, for instance, fold into complex patterns ...

In July 1985, three physicists—Gerd Binnig of the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Christoph Gerber of the University of Basel, and Calvin Quate of Stanford University—puzzled over a problem while ...