spm
Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) is a branch of microscopy that forms images of surfaces using a physical probe that scans the specimen. An image of the surface is obtained by mechanically moving the probe in a raster scan of the specimen, line by line, and recording the probe-surface interaction as a function of position. SPM was founded with the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981
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Many scanning probe microscopes can image several interactions simultaneously. The manner of using these interactions to obtain an image is generally called a mode.
The resolution varies somewhat from technique to technique, but some probe techniques reach a rather impressive atomic resolution. They owe this largely to the ability ofpiezoelectric actuators to execute motions with a precision and accuracy at the atomic level or better on electronic command. One could rightly call this family of techniques "piezoelectric techniques". The other common denominator is that the data are typically obtained as a two-dimensional grid of data points, visualized in false color as a computer image.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_probe_microscopy
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