Room-temperature tunnel current amplifier and experimental setup for high resolution electronic spectroscopy in millikelvin STM experiments

Abstract

The spectroscopic resolution of tunneling measurements performed with a scanning tunneling microscope is ultimately limited by the temperature at which the experiment is performed. To take advantage of the potential high spectroscopic resolution associated with operating an STM in a dilution refrigerator we have designed a room temperature tunnel current amplifier having very small back-action on the tunnel contact and allowing to nearly reach the predicted energy resolution. This design is a modification of the standard op-amp based tip-biasing current-voltage converter which implements differential voltage sensing and whose back action on the tip voltage is only ~2 $\mu$V rms for a 14 MV/A transimpedance and 22 kHz bandwidth.

Available at http://www-spht.cea.fr/articles/s06/033

References in corpus (6)

• A `checkerboard' electronic crystal state in lightly hole-doped Ca_{2-x}Na_{x}CuO_{2}Cl_{2}
• Tunneling Spectroscopy and Vortex Imaging in Boron-Doped Diamond
• A very low temperature STM for the local spectroscopy of mesoscopic structures
• Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy of the superconducting proximity effect in a diluted ferromagnetic alloy
• Local superconducting density of states of ErNi2B2C
• Micro-fabricated electromagnetic filters for millikelvin experiments

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Localization of preformed Cooper-pairs in disordered superconductors
• Phase controlled superconducting proximity effect probed by tunneling spectroscopy
• Quantum breakdown of superconductivity in low-dimensional materials
• Imaging superconducting vortex core and lattice with the scanning tunneling microscope
• A scanning tunneling microscope for spectroscopic imaging below 90 mK in magnetic fields up to 17.5 T
• A modular ultra-high vacuum millikelvin scanning tunneling microscope
• A 30 mK, 13.5 T scanning tunneling microscope with two independent tips
• Millikelvin scanning tunneling microscope at 20/22 T with a graphite enabled stick-slip approach and an energy resolution below 8$\mu$eV: Application to conductance quantization at 20 T in single atom point contacts of Al and Au
• A millikelvin scanning tunneling microscope in ultra-high vacuum with adiabatic demagnetization refrigeration
• Fast low-noise transimpedance amplifier for scanning tunneling microscopy and beyond
• A subKelvin scanning probe microscope for the electronic spectroscopy of an individual nano-device