  Silver dimers were fabricated on Ag(111) by single-atom manipulation using
the tip of a cryogenic scanning tunnelling microscope. An unoccupied electronic
resonance was observed to shift toward the Fermi level with decreasing
atom-atom distance as monitored by spatially resolved scanning tunnelling
spectroscopy. Density functional calculations were used to analyse the
experimental observations and revealed that the coupling between the adsorbed
atoms is predominantly direct rather than indirect via the Ag(111) substrate.
