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Scanning probe microscopes

From 1981 to 1983 Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer worked at IBM in Zürich, Switzerland to study the quantum tunnelling phenomenon. They created a practical instrument, a scanning probe microscope from quantum tunnelling theory, that read very small forces exchanged between a probe and the surface of a sample. The probe approaches the surface so closely that electrons can flow continuously between probe and sample, making a current from surface to probe. The microscope was not initially well received due to the complex nature of the underlying theoretical explanations. In 1984 Jerry Tersoff and D.R. Hamann, while at AT&T's Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey began publishing articles that tied theory to the experimental results obtained by the instrument. This was closely followed in 1985 with functioning commercial instruments, and in 1986 with Gerd Binnig, Quate, and Gerber's invention of the atomic force microscope, then Binnig's and Rohrer's Nobel Prize in Physics for the SPM.

New types of scanning probe microscope have continued to be developed as the ability to machine ultra-fine probes and tips has advanced.