Direct deposition of magnetic dots using a scanning tunneling microscope

Abstract

A scanning tunneling microscope has been used to directly deposit nanometer-scale structures into the input coil of a planar dc superconducting quantum interference device microsusceptometer. Iron pentacarbonyl was used as the source gas for the deposits, yielding dots with diameters ranging from 10 to 30 nm and heights from 30 to 100 nm. Measurements on the particles at low temperatures show them to be magnetic and reveal macroscopic spin properties.