Going fast with STM imaging

Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) is a well established tool in surface science and is applied in related research fields. The large drawback of conventional raster STMs is the slow image acquisition of typically more than 100 s per image. This long acquisition time excludes the direct observation of dynamic processes occurring on sub-second timescales. Therefore, the development of high-speed STMs with the potential to acquire images in less than a second is promising for fundamental and applied research. In this article, the main approaches to increase the frame rate in STM are presented and discussed. The focus is on new unconventional spiral scan patterns.