A collaborative research team, comprising scholars from the University of Science and Technology of China and other esteemed institutions, has successfully engineered a scanning tunneling microscope tip crafted from topological materials. This innovation has paved the way for a novel approach to detecting spin at the atomic scale. Their groundbreaking work has yielded direct experimental evidence of a two-dimensional d-wave staggered magnetic order on the surface of potassium vanadium selenite oxide. Looking ahead, this specially designed tip holds the potential to serve as an atomic-level microscope, enabling the observation of electron spins. The team's related research findings have been recently published in the prestigious journal Nature.
