REAL-TIME OBSERVATION OF THE VIBRATION OF A SINGLE ADSORBED MOLECULE

The newly developed femtosecond field emission camera was used to obse rve the time dependence of field emission through a single copper phth alocyanine molecule adsorbed on a tungsten tip. In many of the individ ual 212-picosecond-long recordings, the field emission was found to os cillate with a frequency between 5 x 10(10) and 20 x 10(10) hertz. The oscillations, which were not observed from a bare tip, are believed t o arise from the vibration of a single molecule with respect to the su rface. Numerical simulations confirmed the statistical significance of the data.