How cold is the junction of a millikelvin scanning tunnelling microscope?
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Abstract
Abstract We employ a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) cooled to millikelvin temperatures by an adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator (ADR) to perform scanning tunnelling spectroscopy (STS) on an atomically clean surface of Al(100) in a superconducting state using normal-metal and superconducting STM tips. Varying the ADR temperatures between 30 mK and 1.2 K, we show that the temperature of the STM junction T is decoupled from the temperature of the surrounding environment Tenv. Simulating the STS data with the P(E) theory, we determine that Tenv ≈ 1.5 K, while the fitting of the superconducting gap spectrum yields the lowest T=77 mK.
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- last seen: 2026-05-19T01:45:01.086888+00:00