An Electrothermodynamic Analysis of the Field Evaporation in the Configuration of Scanning Tunneling Microscope

This paper presents an electrothermodynamic(Born-Haber-type) analysis of field evaporation in the configuration of scanning tunneling microscope, in which the adatom is only partially ionized and evaporated to counter electrode. As a result a formula was derived, which employed a so-called effective binding energy A_eff. The calculated evaporation field for Au^-1, at a tip-sample distance of d = 7.23Å and an evaporation rate of 10¹¹s^-1, is 0.6 V/Å, which agrees well with Chang's experiment Phys. Rev.Lett.72(1994) 574.