Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) is a powerful technique for imaging surfaces with atomic resolution, providing insight into physical and chemical processes at the level of single atoms and molecules. A regular task of STM image analysis is the identification and labelling of features of interest against a uniform background. Performing this manually is a labour-intensive task, requiring significant human effort. To reduce this burden, we propose an automated approach to the segmentation of STM images that uses both few-shot learning and unsupervised learning. Our technique offers greater flexibility compared to previous supervised methods; it removes the requirement for large manually annotated datasets and is thus easier to adapt to an unseen surface while still maintaining a high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using it to recognise atomic features on three distinct surfaces: Si(001), Ge(001), and TiO$_2$(110), including adsorbed AsH$_3$ molecules on the silicon and germanium surfaces. Our model exhibits strong generalisation capabilities, and following initial training, can be adapted to unseen surfaces with as few as one additional labelled data point. This work is a significant step towards efficient and material-agnostic, automatic segmentation of STM images.

Atomic-scale defect detection is shown in scanning tunneling microscopy images of single crystal WSe2 using an ensemble of U-Net-like convolutional neural networks. Standard deep learning test metrics indicated good detection performance with an average F1 score of 0.66 and demonstrated ensemble generalization to C-AFM images of WSe2 and STM images of MoSe2. Defect coordinates were automatically extracted from defect detections maps showing that STM image analysis enhanced by machine learning can be used to dramatically increase sample characterization throughput.

The high technological and strategic stakes mean major technology companies as well as ambitious start-ups and government-funded research centers are all in the race to build the world's first universal quantum computer. In contrast to today's classical computers, where information is encoded in bits (0 or 1), quantum computers process information stored in quantum bits (qubits). These are hosted by quantum mechanical objects like electrons, the negatively charged particles of an atom. Quantum states can also be binary and can be put in one of two possibilities, or effectively both at the same time--known as quantum superposition--offering an exponentially larger computational space with an increasing number of qubits. This unique data crunching power is further boosted by entanglement, another magical property of quantum mechanics where the state of one qubit is able to dictate the state of another qubit without any physical connection, making them all 1's for example.

Atomic-level qubits in silicon are attractive candidates for large-scale quantum computing; however, their quantum properties and controllability are sensitive to details such as the number of donor atoms comprising a qubit and their precise location. This work combines machine learning techniques with million-atom simulations of scanning tunnelling microscopic (STM) images of dopants to formulate a theoretical framework capable of determining the number of dopants at a particular qubit location and their positions with exact lattice site precision. A convolutional neural network (CNN) was trained on 100,000 simulated STM images, acquiring a characterisation fidelity (number and absolute donor positions) of 98% over a set of 17,600 test images including planar and blurring noise commensurate with experimental measurements. The formalism is based on a systematic symmetry analysis and feature-detection processing of the STM images to optimise the computational efficiency. The technique is demonstrated for qubits formed by single and pairs of closely spaced donor atoms, with the potential to generalise it for larger donor clusters.