Detecting Breather Excitations with Inelastic Tunneling Spectroscopy

We propose inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy scanning tunneling microscopy (IETS-STM) as a means of exciting and observing intrinsic localized modes (breathers) in a macromolecule. As a demonstration, inelastic tunneling features of the density of states are calculated for a simple nonlinear elastic Morse chain. The general formalism we have developed for the IETS is applicable to other nonlinear extended objects, such as DNA on a substrate.