Boundary structures of the (n×1) added rows of AgO chains on a Ag(110) surface

✍ Scribed by Masahiro Taniguchi; Ken-ichi Tanaka; Tomihiro Hashizume; Toshio Sakurai

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 616 KB
• Volume: 192
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0009-2614
• DOI: 10.1016/0009-2614(92)85438-g

✦ Synopsis

Linear AgO is grown along the (00 1) direction when a Ag( 110) surface is exposed to O2 at room temperature. After exposure to 760 II O2 the surface is a mixture of p( 3 x 1)-O and (5 x 1)-O phases; the (5 X 1) domain is composed of an alternate arrangement of phases of (3 x 1) and ( 2x 1) periodicity. At the boundary of the p( 3 X 1) and (5 X 1) phases, the two phases can form a smooth junction but the real boundary has a fluctuating structure. When the p( 2 x 1 )-O/Ag( I 10) surface was heated to 500 K, the surface was changed to a p(4x 1) structure composed of the four out-of-phase domains. The boundary of the out-of-phase p( 4 x 1) domains takes either nine or ten atomic spacings, and the boundary adopts a fluctuating linear structure. We conclude that energetically degenerate sites inevitably appear when the two phases make contact, and this results in the fluctuation of the domain boundaries.