Design for a 1 K pot for a low-temperature ultra-high vacuum scanning tunneling microscope

Knowledge of the electronic structure of quantum materials in the vicinity of the Fermi energy is key to understanding and tuning their properties and to making them useful for applications. While for bulk materials in single crystal form, spatially averaging techniques, such as angular resolved photoemission, now routinely reach sufficient energy and momentum resolution to achieve this, for thin film samples, intrinsic structural variation and inhomogeneity make it more challenging to gain a full understanding from spatially integrating techniques. Quasiparticle interference (QPI) provides a route to obtaining information about the electronic structure on a sub-millielectronvolt energy scale, with an energy resolution primarily limited by temperature. Efficient acquisition of QPI maps requires long hold times and low temperatures, ideally below 4 K in an ultra-high vacuum environment. Here, we introduce a 1 K-pot design that achieves efficient cooling with continuous feeding while not adding to the noise level and demonstrate its performance in scanning tunneling microscopy measurements.