Influence of the Interorbital Interference on the Electron Tunneling in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

This article presents theoretical study of the influence of the interorbital interference on the electron tunneling in scanning tunneling microscopy. Detailed analysis shows that this kind of interference may modify significantly the tunneling current by the increase or decrease in the current contributions flowing through different orbitals of the surface atoms. This factor might cause the differences between the height and kind of scanning tunneling microscopy corrugation at different metal surfaces. This also might be a source of the unexpectedly high corrugation obtained from scanning tunneling microscopy measurements performed for some metal surfaces, which cannot be explained by the charge distribution along the substrate surface. The effects connected with the interorbital interference will be discussed in the context of the scanning tunneling microscopy simulations performed for Ni$\text{}_{3}$Al (111) and (001) surfaces.