Modeling Green's function measurements with two-tip scanning tunneling microscopy

Abstract

A double-tip scanning tunneling microscope with nanometer-scale tip separation has the ability to access the single-electron Green's function in real and momentum spaces based on second-order tunneling processes. Experimental realization of such measurements has been limited to quasi-one-dimensional systems due to the extremely small signal size. Here we propose an alternative approach to obtain such information by exploiting the current-current correlations from the individual tips and present a theoretical formalism to describe it. To assess the feasibility of our approach we make a numerical estimate for an ∼25-nm Pb nanoisland and show that the wave function in fact extends from tip to tip and the signal depends less strongly on increased tip separation in the diffusive regime than the one in alternative approaches relying on tip-to-tip conductance.