Due to the dependence of the tunnel current to material properties like work function, density of states, and spin polarization the scanning tunneling microscope can be used to study a number of solid state physics problems. This will be illustrated with some examples. The presented examples have in common that also the role of the tip properties have to be taken explicitly into account.
The surface states of 3d transition metals are studied by scanning tunneling microscopy and scanning tunneling spectroscopy. The results show that surface states can be used for chemical identification with high spatial resolution. The spin polarized nature of the surface states allows us to obtain magnetic contrast in scanning tunneling miroscopy imaging with near atomic resolution. For Cr(100) we found that the surface state close to the Fermi level can be explained by an orbital Kondo resonance surface state.
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