The space between the STM tip and the sample is almost unimaginably small, about six angstroms or 0.6 nanometers. At this resolution, we could see how the charge distributions change on the sample.” “It makes for an extremely sensitive probe, allowing us to see variations down to 0.1 angstrom. “The hydrogen molecule became part of the quantum microscope in the sense that wherever the microscope scanned, the hydrogen was there in between the tip and the sample,” said Ho. The duration of the cyclic oscillations is vanishingly brief – lasting mere tens of picoseconds – but by measuring this “decoherence time” and the cyclic periods, the scientists were able to see how the hydrogen molecule was interacting with its environment. Through a laser pulse, the scientists can coax the system to go from a ground state to an excited state in a cyclical fashion resulting in a superposition of the two states. Ho said the hydrogen molecule is an example of a two-level system because its orientation shifts between two positions, up and down and slightly horizontally tilted. “A quantum microscope that relies on probing the coherent superposition of states in a two-level system is much more sensitive than existing instruments that are not based on this quantum physics principle.”
“This project represents an advance in both the measurement technique and the scientific question the approach allowed us to explore,” said co-author Wilson Ho, Bren Professor of physics & astronomy and chemistry. With pulses of the laser lasting trillionths of a second, the scientists were able to excite the hydrogen molecule and detect changes in its quantum states at cryogenic temperatures and in the ultrahigh vacuum environment of the instrument, rendering atomic-scale, time-lapsed images of the sample. The researchers in UCI’s Department of Physics & Astronomy and Department of Chemistry describe how they positioned two bound atoms of hydrogen in between the silver tip of the STM and a sample composed of a flat copper surface arrayed with small islands of copper nitride. This new technique can also be applied to the analysis of two-dimensional materials, which have the potential to play a role in advanced energy systems, electronics, and quantum computers.
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