Moving forward, I think you may have misread my sentence: “…First, like the electron microscope or traditional AFM, the IBM setup can’t be done in the open air. You need a very high level vacuum, absurdly low temperatures (5 Kelvin), and a lot of time – more than 20 hours for a scan.” – The sentence construction here isn’t the clearest, I know. My intent, however, was to allude to what you discussed in your comment. That is, all of these techniques require a lot of prep work and specialized conditions in order to succeed.

Moving forward, I think you may have misread my sentence: “…First, like the electron microscope or traditional AFM, the IBM setup can’t be done in the open air. You need a very high level vacuum, absurdly low temperatures (5 Kelvin), and a lot of time – more than 20 hours for a scan.” – The sentence construction here isn’t the clearest, I know. My intent, however, was to allude to what you discussed in your comment. That is, all of these techniques require a lot of prep work and specialized conditions in order to succeed.

And yes, as the name “Atomic Force Microscope” implies, it is indeed considered a microscope.

However, I need to take issue with you saying that electron microscopes operate in open air, which is not true. You need at least a low vacuum to operate one (if you have a special environmental SEM), in more common practice you need a high vacuum, around 6×10^-6 Torr. In the cases of fancier scopes (that is, one with exotic electron sources) you need multiple vacuums, the one at the electron source exceeding 10^-11 Torr (also known as ultra-high vacuum).

I’m kinda surprised that STEMs can’t be used to image these molecules, they have a lateral resolution down into the Angstrom or sub-angstrom range, but perhaps they too destroy the sample, as they are running a quantum tunneling current through the material (or something like that).

MRFM, magnetic resonance force microscopy doesn’t have resolution down this low yet, but may achieve it – it’s very similar to how AFM works, but can image in 3 dimensions, and as it operates in the same ultra-high vacuum, ultra-cold temperatures as this AFM mode, perhaps the same sharpening techniques could be applied.

And yes, as the name “Atomic Force Microscope” implies, it is indeed considered a microscope.

However, I need to take issue with you saying that electron microscopes operate in open air, which is not true. You need at least a low vacuum to operate one (if you have a special environmental SEM), in more common practice you need a high vacuum, around 6×10^-6 Torr. In the cases of fancier scopes (that is, one with exotic electron sources) you need multiple vacuums, the one at the electron source exceeding 10^-11 Torr (also known as ultra-high vacuum).

I’m kinda surprised that STEMs can’t be used to image these molecules, they have a lateral resolution down into the Angstrom or sub-angstrom range, but perhaps they too destroy the sample, as they are running a quantum tunneling current through the material (or something like that).

MRFM, magnetic resonance force microscopy doesn’t have resolution down this low yet, but may achieve it – it’s very similar to how AFM works, but can image in 3 dimensions, and as it operates in the same ultra-high vacuum, ultra-cold temperatures as this AFM mode, perhaps the same sharpening techniques could be applied.