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3 Adopting, Adapting, Departing: Early STM at IBM and at Bell Labs Scientists at IBM Research and at Bell Labs were not the only early adopters of the STM, but in the mid 1980s one could get that impression. For instance, Jim Murday, a program officer at the Office of Naval Research who funded many surface scientists and probe microscopists (and who assembled his own surface-science STM group at the Naval Research Lab), notes that when he compiled statistics on which nations sent participants to early STM conferences, he listed IBM as a country all by itself.1 If we think of the STM community as a network that, at the beginning, had Binnig, Rohrer, and Gerber as its central nodes, the view from that center largely confirms the dominance of IBM and Bell Labs in those early years. For instance, in 1986, when it was still possible to comprehend everything that members of the STM community had published and to weight their work by quality, Binnig and Rohrer reviewed the literature in the IBM Journal of Research and Development.2 In that review, about a quarter of the citations to tunneling microscopy research were of works co-authored by Binnig and Rohrer themselves. About another quarter were by others at IBM Zurich (or who had been there when the STM was invented), and a little more than a quarter were from Bell Labs or from IBM’s US research centers. The remaining quarter was a mixed bag, though one can identify four university groups that were emerging as important nodes in the STM network: the University of Basel, the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Stanford University, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. This chapter focuses on the first few years of STM, when IBM and Bell Labs were the giants of research in tunneling microscopy. It was in those years that an STM community came into being. At the beginning of the period, STM was carried on, in relative isolation, by people whose knowledge of the technique came almost entirely from Binnig and Rohrer. 60 Chapter 3 Between 1984 and 1987, however, STMers established an annual conference series and other mechanisms that allowed microscopists outside Zurich to form connections with each other, rather than relying solely on their ties back to Zurich. The period was brief, but it left an enduring mark on the probemicroscopy community. In particular, it established a lasting distinction between surface-science STM and other varieties of probe microscopy. That distinction was never abrupt—surface-science STMers interacted amicably with other probe microscopists, and a few eventually transitioned to AFM and other variants. Yet most surface scientists held quite different views than the rest of the community about the proper scope, application, and design of probe microscopes. In the early 1990s, some of these surfacescience STMers became dissatisfied enough with other kinds of probe microscopy that they tried to secede and form a new community. As we will see in chapter 6, other probe microscopists—those who opposed such balkanization—latched onto the label “nanotechnology” as a way to consolidate their instrumental community. By the end of the 1990s, nanotechnology had become a valuable resource for surface scientists as well, and many early surface-science STMers are now widely recognized leaders in nanotechnology policy and research. This perhaps temporary and certainly never complete disaggregation of surface-science STM from the rest of probe microscopy came about, in part, because of the way the original Zurich team’s work was first replicated . As Binnig and Rohrer’s 1986 literature review shows, nearly all the other Zurich STMers learned the technique through sustained, cooperative interaction with the inventors. In fact, nearly all the Zurich papers cited in that review were by people who co-authored other papers with Binnig and Rohrer. Similarly, the four university groups that can be seen in that review to have been emerging as centers of probe microscopy (those in Madrid, Basel, Palo Alto, and Santa Barbara) all had close ties to Zurich. Nicolás García and Arturo Baro brought the STM to Madrid after sabbaticals at IBM Zurich, and co-authored extensively with the Zurich team in the mid 1980s. Hans-Joachim Güntherodt’s group at Basel was less than 50 miles from, and interacted frequently with, the Zurich lab. The Santa Barbara and Stanford groups became major contributors to probe microscopy with the help of prolonged visits by (and collaborations with) members...

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