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What are atomic terraces on a gold surface?
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scanning tunneling microscope
How atoms can be seen.
Atomic terraces on a gold surface are flat, broad regions of the crystal lattice that appear when the surface is imaged using a scanning tunneling microscope.
When physicists Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer first used the instrument to image gold, they observed these terraces separated by steps that were exactly one atom in height. These features represent the topographical structure of the metal at the atomic scale, providing a direct visual representation of the surface's arrangement.1