Physics education research, electronic materials, and the musings of Christopher Moore, Ph.D.

I realize I haven’t written an update on the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in a while. I had mentioned about a month ago that the STM was working; however, Donnie left for Old Dominion University via our 3/2 engineering program and I haven’t yet recruited a student to pick up the pieces. I’m working out [...]

Donnie and I have finally managed to get a stable tunneling current with our STM. On Thursday we ran a couple of traces in the x-direction, and as long as we didn’t touch the table or the air handler wasn’t on we saw minimal historesis. Next week we will set everything up on stone block/foam [...]

My student and I are still working hard on our scanning tunneling microscope. We’ve had some issues with the solder-less breadboard we were using to prototype. Stuff was shorting on the breadboard, so we placed the components on a proto-board and soldered them together. The pre-amp is now working exactly like it should. We supply [...]

I am a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) guy. I completed my M.S. thesis using a commercial instrument and I have always wanted to build one. Until recently, I haven’t had the time or the money. About 1 month ago, a student here at Longwood University approached me about doing a project. The first thing that [...]