Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) achieves atomic-scale resolution due to the exponential dependence of the tunneling current on the distance from the tip to the surface. The majority of tunneling electrons traverse the junction elastically via coherent quantum mechanical coupling between the electronic states of the tip and the conducting substrate. However, a small fraction of tunneling electrons undergoes inelastic scattering, losing parts of their energy to available dynamic modes in the junction with the energy that is less or equal to the electrochemical potential of one of the tunneling leads relative to the Fermi level of the other. Depending on the atomic electronic structure of the tunneling junction and the tunneling conditions, the excited processes may include localized plasmons with subsequent photon emission [1x2013;4], frustrated [5] and free [6] adsorbate motion, formation of charged species [7], molecular fluorescence [8], rotation [9], vibration [10], bond breaking [11, 12], and isomerization [13, 14]. The STM can therefore glimpse far beyond the local electronic structure of the junction and it has been extensively used to explore the dynamic functionality of surfaces, nanoparticles, and single molecules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]