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About 15 years ago scientists and engineers began to wonder how to visualize real atoms. Furthermore they thought about to manipulate and modify molecules. In the past years this is common in chemistry. But its methods are constrained to synthesise larger quantitudes of molecules rather than move individual atoms.
Two decades ago Dr. Gerd Binnig and Dr. Heinrich Rohrer from IBM Research Zurich fulfilled the former desire by building the first Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM). They received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1986 for their work. a series of new microscopes which we subsume to Scanning Probe Microscopes (SPM). The principle of three of these microscopes shall be explained in this course.
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