Here we show scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM), non-contact atomic force microscopy (AFM) and inelastic electron tunnelling spectroscopy (IETS) measurements on organic molecule with a CO- terminated tip at 5K. The high-resolution contrast observed simultaneously in all channels unam- biguously demonstrates the common imaging mechanism in STM/AFM/IETS, related to the lateral bending of the CO-functionalized tip. The IETS spectroscopy reveals that the submolecular con- trast at 5K consists of both renormalization of vibrational frequency and variation of the amplitude of IETS signal. This finding is also corroborated by first principles simulations. We extend accord- ingly the probe-particle AFM/STM/IETS model to include these two main ingredients necessary to reproduce the high-resolution IETS contrast. We also employ the first principles simulations to get more insight into different response of frustrated translation and rotational modes of CO-tip during imaging.
@article{arxiv.1710.06180,
title = {Submolecular resolution by variation of IETS amplitude and its relation to AFM/STM signal},
author = {Bruno de la Torre and Martin Švec and Giuseppe Foti and Ondřej Krejčí and Prokop Hapala and Aran Garcia-Lekue and Thomas Frederiksen and Radek Zbořil and Andrés Arnau and Héctor Vázquez and Pavel Jelínek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.06180},
year = {2017}
}