We analyze electrostatic interaction between a sharp conducting tip and a thin one-dimensional wire, e.g., a carbon nanotube, in a scanned gate microscopy (SGM) experiment. The problem is analytically tractable if the wire resides on a thin dielectric substrate above a metallic backgate. The characteristic spatial scale of the electrostatic coupling to the tip is equal to its height above the substrate. Numerical simulations indicate that imaging of individual electrons by SGM is possible once the mean electron separation exceeds this scale (typically, a few tens of nm). Differences between weakly and strongly invasive SGM regimes are pointed out.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0606583,
title = {Scanned gate microscopy of a one-dimensional quantum dot},
author = {Lingfeng M. Zhang and Michael M. Fogler},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0606583},
year = {2010}
}