The objective of our work is to determine:a) whether both of the imaging methods (TEM, STM) yield comparable data andb) which method is better suited for a reliable structure analysis of microclusters smaller than 1.5 nm, where a deviation of the bulk structure is expected.The silver was evaporated in a bell-jar system (p 10−5 pa) and deposited onto a 6 nm thick amorphous carbon film and a freshly cleaved highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG).The average deposited Ag thickness is 0.1 nm, controlled by a quartz crystal microbalance at a deposition rate of 0.02 nm/sec. The high resolution TEM investigations (100 kV) were executed by a hollow-cone illumination (HCI). For the STM investigations a commercial STM was used. With special vibration isolation we achieved a resolution of 0.06 nm (inserted diffraction image in Fig. 1c). The carbon film shows the remarkable reduction in noise by using HCI (Fig. 1a). The HOPG substrate (Fig. 1b), cleaved in sheets thinner than 30 nm for the TEM investigations, shows the typical arrangement of a nearly perfect stacking order and varying degrees of rotational disorder (i.e. artificial single crystals). The STM image (Fig. 1c) demonstrates the high degree of order in HOPG with atomic resolution.
