Hot STM Labs

Si(001) Step Dynamics, Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 2710 (1995).

Chris Pearson, Brian Borovsky, Michael Krueger, Robert Curtis, and Eric Ganz

We used a scanning tunneling microscope to study the dynamics of step edges on the Si(001)-(2x1) reconstructed surface at temperatures from 520 to 700 K. We count changes in step edge position to determine the rates of attachment and detachment events which occur in units of four Si atoms (two dimers). Surface mass transport at these temperatures is dominated by kink diffusion. From an Arrhenius plot we find the effective activation energy for kink diffusion to be 0.97 ± 0.12 eV with a prefactor of 3x105 s -1


Jump to

  • Hot STM Labs
  • Hot STM Studies of Si(001) step edges during annealing
  • Abstracts of published work
  • Copyright 1996 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota