The scanning thermal microscope (SThM) is providing the first opportunity to study thermal phenomena at nanometer scales. So far it has been used to thermally probe electrically heated devices such as 30- to 500-nm-wide metal lines, single transistors, and vertical-cavity surface-emitting quantum-well lasers. It has been demonstrated that the SThM can reach an unprecedented spatial resolution of sub-10 nm. The ability to access this regime opens the promising prospects of thermally and optically probing quantum structures and single molecules. It also creates the possibility of discovering new energy transport phenomena, since macroscopic laws and definitions of heat transfer break down at these scales.
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