Measuring Exchange Interactions using Helium

Read our new paper in Physical Review Letters to find out how one can use helium to measure exchange interactions between a sample and the tip of a Scanning Tunneling Microscope. We show that helium becomes trapped in the tunneling junction, but can be ejected by the tunneling electrons enabling us to spatially map its binding energy. Alternative title could have been ‘how a helium leak enabled us to probe exchange interactions’.