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🔬 Scanning Tunneling Microscope Lab

Drag an atomically sharp tip across a lattice of surface atoms and watch the quantum tunneling current — which depends exponentially on the vacuum gap — build a real STM-style topographic image.

Physics & Mechanics3DAdvanced60 FPS

Drag an atomically sharp tip across a lattice of surface atoms and watch the quantum tunneling current — which depends exponentially on the vacuum gap — build a real STM-style topographic image, one raster line at a time.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Tunneling current falls off exponentially with tip-sample distance and barrier (work function) height. In constant-current mode the tip's height trace over the raster becomes a direct atomic-resolution map of the surface.

🎮 How to Use

Adjust tip height, work function, bias voltage and scan speed. Toggle between constant-current and constant-height imaging modes and watch the trail mesh accumulate a topographic scan of the atom lattice.

💡 Did You Know?

Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer won half of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the STM — the first instrument to directly image individual atoms on a surface using nothing but a quantum tunneling current.

⚙ Under the hood

Drag an atomically sharp tip across a lattice of surface atoms and watch the quantum tunneling current — which depends exponentially on the vacuum gap — build a real STM-style topographic image.

quantum-mechanicsscanning tunneling microscopystmsurface sciencematerialsphysics simulationatomic scaleThree.js

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install