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. 2024 Sep;8(9):e2301526.
doi: 10.1002/smtd.202301526. Epub 2024 Feb 21.

An Atomic-Scale Vector Network Analyzer

Susanne Baumann  1 , Gregory McMurtrie  1 , Max Hänze  1   2 , Nicolaj Betz  1 , Lukas Arnhold  1 , Luigi Malavolti  2 , Sebastian Loth  1   2
Affiliations

An Atomic-Scale Vector Network Analyzer

Susanne Baumann et al. Small Methods. 2024 Sep.

Abstract

Electronic devices have been ever-shrinking toward atomic dimensions and have reached operation frequencies in the GHz range, thereby outperforming most conventional test equipment, such as vector network analyzers (VNA). Here the capabilities of a VNA on the atomic scale in a scanning tunneling microscope are implemented. Nonlinearities present in the voltage-current characteristic of atoms and nanostructures for phase-resolved microwave spectroscopy with unprecedented spatial resolution at GHz frequencies are exploited. The amplitude and phase response up to 9.3 GHz is determined, which permits accurate de-embedding of the transmission line and application of distortion-corrected waveforms in the tunnel junction itself. This enables quantitative characterization of the complex-valued admittance of individual magnetic iron atoms which show a lowpass response with a magnetic-field-tunable cutoff frequency.

Keywords: atomic‐scale; phase‐resolved microwave spectroscopy; scanning tunneling microscopy; vector network analyzer.

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