WHAT IS THE ATOMIC-STRUCTURE AT SOLID-STATE INTERFACES

Significant progress has been made towards our understanding of Schottky barriers, ohmic contacts to GaAs, and misfit dislocation generation at heteroepitaxial interfaces. These subjects are briefly reviewed in this paper. However, many of the remaining issues still hinge on a more detailed knowledge of the atomic structure at interfaces and its effect on electron transport. A new technique, ideal for this problem, entitled ballistic electron emission microscopy (BEEM) is described. In BEEM the spatial resolution of the scanning tunneling microscope is used to probe the local current transport at an interface.