SCANNING TUNNELING MICROSCOPE DATA-ACQUISITION AND CONTROL IN VISUAL BASIC

A general purpose data acquisition and control system for scanning tun neling microscopy (STM) using Visual Basic is presented. This Windows hosted Visual Basic environment is highly desirable for use in STM ima ge manipulation, storage, and printing, but in its standard form is no t suitable for most data acquisition and display applications. Many of the inherent limitations in the Visual Basic language have been overc ome by the use of direct calls to the Windows Application Program Inte rface. In this paper, we describe a general Visual Basic STM user inte rface and control system, and the extensions to the language using the Windows API needed to implement this system.