Our software eliminates up to 80% of vibrational noise in a scanning tunneling microscope

Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and scanning tunneling spectroscopy (STS) are globally employed techniques to measure the electronic structure of condensed matter systems with atomic precision. They require extremely stable environments to operate: modern microscopes typically use a combination of pneumatic isolators and massive inertial blocks to reduce ambient vibrations to the picometer scale. However, improvements beyond this benchmark are challenging and even the best microscopes are still limited by residual vibrations. Here we demonstrate a software algorithm that cancels up to 80% of vibrational noise over a 300 Hz bandwidth, even in modern ultra-lowvibration laboratories. Our scheme relies on a precisely calibrated transfer function to accurately propagate geophone-recorded vibrations to the STM tip. These vibrations are then subtracted from spectroscopic and topographic measurements by post processing. Our algorithm mitigates STM vibrational noise in a wide range of experimental environments, including those with high-amplitude noise.