ANISOTROPIC STRAIN EFFECT ON MORPHOLOGY AND ATOMIC STRUCTURE OF VICINAL Si(001) SURFACE

On vicinal Si(001) surfaces, dependence of growth morphology on the applied strain direction and formation of vacancy lines from Ag-induced missing dimer vacancies are studied. Both phenomena are intimately related to the anisotropic nature of the strain field which originates from the surface dimerization. Strain relief mechanism, reflecting on the surface morphology, is shown to be different in two orthogonal directions. Normal to the steps, step-pair bunching and waving lead to formation of hillocks and pits. Along the step direction, bending of step pairs forms a cusp which later develops into a deep groove. Toward the atomic scale, the formation of the vacancy lines is driven by the short-range attractive interaction between the vacancies in adjacent dimer rows and the long-range repulsive interaction between them in the same dimer row. A full form and magnitudes of the interactions are derived from the thermally-excited wandering of the vacancy lines formed by a nominal amount of Ag depositing onto the surface.     

Stabilities in field electron emissions from noble‐metal covered W nano‐tips: apex structure dependence

We observed field emission microscopy (FEM) patterns of noble‐metal (NM) covered W nano‐tips with three different apex structures fabricated by field evaporation. Each of the three tips was terminated with a single atom, three atoms or ten atoms. We investigated the temporal changes in the FEM of these tips to discuss the stabilities in the spatial distributions of the field emission (FE) beams. The single‐atom tip showed two characteristics that were superior to the others. First, the beams emitted from the single‐atom tip were the most collimated among the three tips (the semi‐cone angle of 1.0° , FWHM). Second, adsorption of residual gas had little influence on FE from the single‐atom tip, while the other tips were easily contaminated even at ultra high vacuum, resulting in the emission fluctuation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Identifying a dot-matrix hologram with the fringe-overlapping phenomena of grating dots

Dot-matrix holograms created by two-beam writers contain many grating dots. Because the phase difference between two laser beams for interference cannot be controlled accurately, the fringe positions of grating dots are randomly determined. Therefore, fringe positions are a good kind of tool to identify dot-matrix holograms. In this paper, a number difference between two special fringes of a target grating dot is used to identify a dot-matrix hologram. The two special fringes are determined by three grating dots with parallel fringes. The first special fringe is corresponding to a fringe pair with the best matching for the fringes of the target grating dot and the fringes of the second grating dot. The second special fringe is corresponding to a fringe pair with the best matching for the fringes of the target grating dot and the fringes of the third grating dot. An experiment has proved the proposed method practical and feasible. Because reproducing a grating dot with a specified fringe number difference is difficult, the proposed method is excellent for anti-counterfeiting.     

The influence of oxygen on the continuum emission from ion-bombarded metal surfaces

Spectral scans of 12 metals: Al, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mg, Mo, Ni, Pd, Si, Ti and W under Ar⁺ ion bombardment have been taken with and without backfilled oxygen in the target chamber to study the effect of oxygen on the emission of continuum radiation. Some of the observed broad band features can be attributed to sputtered metal-oxide molecular emission while other continua remain unidentified. In all cases except Pd, increasing the partial pressure of oxygen enhances the continuum emission.     

ToF atom-probe fim study of LaB6 single crystals

The field evaporation mass spectra of LaB₆ are obtained with time-of-flight atom-probe field ion microscope in vacuum and in the presence of hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. The spectra are consistent with a preferential chemisorption of these gases on boron sites.     

Self-organized growth of nanopucks on Pb quantum islands

Electronic Moirè patterns found on lead (Pb) quantum islands can serve as a template to grow self-organized cluster (nanopucks) arrays of various materials. These patterns can be divided into fcc- and hcp-stacked areas, which exhibit different binding strengths to the deposited adatoms. For Ag adatoms, the binding energy can differ substantially and the confined nucleation thus occurs in the fcc sites. Both the size distribution and spatial arrangement of the Ag nanopucks are analyzed and found to be commensurate with the characteristics of the template island, which exhibits a bilayer oscillatory behavior.