Noise Spectroscopy on A Single Spin with STM

Abstract-final report on BSF’s project: Noise spectroscopy on a single spin with STM Principle investigators: Yishay Manassen, Yoseph Imry, Alexander Balatsky

Several experimental works in a collaboration with other groups (in Italy and in Japan) were performed, both in UHV and ambient conditions (on silicon radicals prepared by room temperature oxidation and on adsorbed paramagnetic molecules, respectively). In these works a statistical approach as adopted, by looking at many single spin spectra. The similarity with macroscopic ESR was shown when averaging over approximately 100 spectra was shown.

Additional experiments were performed on Si surface with C. Typical hyperfine spectrum characteristics of SiC were observed with ESR-STM. We demonstrated that it is possible to distinguish between 28Si and 29Si atom. The results demonstrate that inelastic spin flips are involved in the ESR-STM process.

A theoretical work explaining this phenomenon in terms of Fano like interefernces between multiple resonances was performed. Another theoretical work shows how this phenomenon can be used to detect a single nuclear spin. Finally, a large review, submitted to Adv. Phys. was written, that describes the present status of this research field.