March 3, 1986

Atomic force microscopy

Binnig, Quate and Gerber publish the first atomic-force-microscope paper

To read one microscope’s cantilever, the inventors parked the tip of a different kind of microscope right behind it.

Volume 56, page 930

Physical Review Letters published “Atomic Force Microscope” by Gerd Binnig, Calvin F. Quate and Christoph Gerber on 3 March 1986. The journal had received the manuscript on 5 December 1985.

The listing names a “Christopher Berger.” The co-author was Christoph Gerber, an IBM Zurich researcher then on leave in California.

A stylus that could read insulators

The instrument combined scanning-tunnelling-microscope and stylus-profilometer principles so that insulating surfaces, not merely conducting ones, could be examined at atomic scale. The paper proposed sensing forces as small as 10⁻¹⁸ newton.

The prototype balanced a diamond tip on a strip of gold foil 25 micrometres thick and 0.8 millimetres long, with an STM tip behind the cantilever reading its tunnelling current — not the reflected laser familiar from later AFMs.

What the measurements showed, and did not

The authors reported preliminary measurements made in air rather than a theoretical proposal alone: roughly 30 ångström lateral resolution and better than 1 ångström vertical.

Sub-ångström vertical sensitivity is not the same as lateral atomic resolution, and the paper did not show individually resolved atoms.

The three were also not all IBM scientists, as the article behind the listing has it: Quate was at Stanford and also affiliated with Xerox PARC.

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