Physicists at the University of Regensburg have found a way to manipulate the quantum state of individual electrons using a microscope with atomic resolution. The results of the study have now been published in the journal Nature.
We, and everything around us, consist of molecules. The molecules are so tiny that even a speck of dust contains countless numbers of them. It is now routinely possible to precisely image such molecules with an atomic force microscope, which works quite differently from an optical microscope: it is based on sensing tiny forces between a tip and the molecule under study.
Using this type of microscope, one can even image the internal structure of a molecule. Although one can watch the molecule this way, this does not imply knowing all its different properties. For instance, it is already very hard to determine which kind of atoms the molecule consists of.
Luckily, there are other tools around that can determine the composition of molecules. One of them is electron spin resonance, which is based on similar principles to an MRI scanner in medicine. In electron spin resonance, one usually needs, however, countless molecules to obtain a signal that is large enough to be detectable. With this approach, one cannot access the properties of every molecule, but only their average.
Researchers at the University of Regensburg, led by Prof. Dr. Jascha Repp from the Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics at the UR, have now integrated electron spin resonance into atomic force microscopy.
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