This paper reports the observation of the vacuum tunnelling gap between two conductors of a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM), using a highresolution transmission electron microscope (TEM). A micromachine scanning tunnelling microscope (μ-STM) is made on a 2.5 mm2 chip, by an advanced ultra-large scale integrated circuit (ULSI) technology with a minimum dimension of 0.4 μm and alignment accuracy of 0.1 μm. The μ-STM is designed to fit into a TEM sample holder for direct observation of the tip apex, and the results demonstrate the possibility of analysing the tunnelling gap physics and material transport mechanisms at the tipapex.
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Lutwyche et al. (1997) studied this question.