ABSTRACT
The development of the topografiner began in the context of a burst of surface studies following World War II, when many new surface analysis techniques were becoming available. In the late 1960s surface scientists sought to study single-crystal surfaces, where theory and experiment could be compared in the study of corrosion, catalysis, surface electronic properties, and other surface properties of importance to the nascent microcircuit industry. The first successful scanning probe microscope was Russell Youngis topografiner. In this instrument, a field emission current between the tip and sample was employed for feedback control. The instrument's first published images were included in Young's review of surface microtopography techniques for Physics Today. The explosion of scanning probe microscopy (SPM) activity began after publication of atomic resolution images of silicon in 1983 and the award of the Nobel Prize in Physics to Binnig and Rohrer in 1986 made scanning tunneling microscopy famous. SPM has found applications in physics, chemistry, biology and other fields.
