Gross revealed to physicsworld.com that there was an element of luck in discovering that carbon monoxide makes for a highly effective AFM tip because they had picked up the CO molecule by accident during routine use of their conventional AFM. The researchers were quick, however, to realize that the observed improvement in resolution made scientific sense because CO has been used in scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM), for many years, to improve resolution for the same reason.
Now, this is funny how we can discover things even if we're not trying to.
Gross says that he and his team intend to develop their research with the short term goal of improving resolution and building up a catalogue of chemical signatures for a range of different atoms and molecules. Eventually the CO-tipped AFM could be used to determine the identity of unidentified familiar molecules for use in chemical analysis. In the longer term, new forms of AFM such as this could be applied to the study of chemical rea