The objective is to develop and optimize experimental methods for recording phase transition ‘movies’ on timescales from picoseconds to hours. The building of an ultrafast timescale (THz resolution) STM involves a number of innovations (described in the Methods section) that are designed to circumvent certain crucial shortcomings of current state of the art ultrafast STM setups [8–10,40,55]. The objective is to build a system capable of imaging areas ~ 20 x 20 nm with 1 nm resolution or better, using stroboscopic measurements at variable delay times and 1 ps time resolution after a ‘destruction pulse’ that causes a phase transition. On longer timescales, the objective is to build the capability for single-shot, real-time movies of domain reordering with up to 100 frames per second (FPS). Transient superconductivity – when relevant – will be measured by 4-tip STM on timescales down to μs.
More details on SICRIS
The research project is (co)financed by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency.