STM-Untersuchungen von Diamant- und DLC-Schichten

Methodological problems of the applicability of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) for the characterization of poorly conductive diamond and diamond-like carbon films are discussed. The sensitivity of STM to variation of the surface relief is characterized by a decay length d. It is shown that d depends on the serial resistance R of the sample seen by a tunneling microscope. For R<10 M Omega d is less than 1 nm that enables to image the samples with reasonable quality and correct reproduction of surface corrugations.