Letter Published: 05 April 1990 Nature volume 344, pages 524–526 (1990)Cite this article 18k Accesses 2640 Citations 160 Altmetric Metrics details AbstractSINCE its invention in the early 1980s by Binnig and Rohrer1,2, the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) has provided images of surfaces and adsorbed atoms and molecules with unprecedented resolution. The STM has also been used to modify surfaces, for example by locally pinning molecules to a surface3 and by transfer of an atom from the STM ti...