Hydrogen-bond imaging and engineering with a scanning tunnelling microscope

The scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) has been a valuable tool in surface science for the study of structures and electronic states of metal surfaces. The recent advance of STM as a state-of-the-art technique to probe and manipulate individual molecules has made it possible to investigate molecular dynamics and chemical reactions at the surface in a single-molecule limit. In this review paper, we present an overview of our recent work of H-bond imaging, manipulating and engineering at a metal surface. From individual water molecules, a variety of H-bonded structures including water clusters, hydroxyl clusters and water–hydroxyl complexes are assembled on Cu(1 1 0), whose properties and dynamics are studied in real space in collaboration with density-functional-theory calculations.