Abstract
I review a number of advances and milestones in the acquisition of submolecular resolution scanning probe microscope images of the buckminsterfullerene (\(\text{C}_{60}\)) molecule. Scanning tunneling microscopy essentially provides an image derived from the local density of states of the electronic structure of a molecule within an energy window defined by the tip-sample bias voltage. These measurements of the local density of states, which are generally interpreted in terms of molecular orbital probability density, have now been complemented by non-contact atomic force microscopy (NC-AFM) images of the internal structure of the molecule. The NC-AFM images yield either atomic resolution (if imaging occurs in the attractive regime of the tip-sample potential), or, in the Pauli exclusion regime, remarkable maps of the charge density of the interatomic bonds. This combination of scanning probe techniques is exceptionally powerful in elucidating the correlations between atomic structure, bond order, and the submolecular distribution and symmetry of electron density.
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Notes
- 1.
This measurement is weighted, of course, by the density of states of the tip and the details of the tunneling process itself, including the variation in tunnel probability for electrons with different energies.
- 2.
“Non-contact” is something of a misnomer, given that many of the highest resolution images to date have been acquired in the Pauli exclusion, i.e., strongly repulsive, regime of the tip-sample potential as described later in this chapter. Dynamic force microscopy is a somewhat more appropriate description, but the NC-AFM term is now firmly embedded in the field and so, for consistency, I will also use it here.
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Acknowledgments
The results of the Nottingham Nanoscience group described in this chapter stem from the work of many researchers with whom it has been my pleasure to collaborate including, in particular (and in alphabetical order): Joseph Bamidele (King’s College, London (KCL)), Cristina Chiutu, Rosanna Danza, Janette Dunn, Sam Jarvis, Lev Kantorovich (KCL), Andrew Lakin, Andrew Stannard, Peter Sharp, Adam Sweetman, and Richard Woolley. We are very grateful for financial support from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the form of a fellowship (EP/G007837), from the Leverhulme Trust (through grant F/00114/BI), from the European Commission’s ICT-FET programme via the Atomic Scale and Single Molecule Logic gate Technologies (AtMol) project (www.atmol.eu), Contract No. 270028, and the ACRITAS Marie Curie Initial Training Network (www.acritas.eu). We are also very grateful for the support of the University of Nottingham High Performance Computing Facility.
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Moriarty, P. (2013). Submolecular Resolution Imaging of \(\text{C}_{60}\): From Orbital Density to Bond Order. In: Grill, L., Joachim, C. (eds) Imaging and Manipulating Molecular Orbitals. Advances in Atom and Single Molecule Machines. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38809-5_14
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