Defect-driven selective metal oxidation at atomic scale

Atomic-scale determination of misfit dislocation loops at metal-metal interfaces.

Effects of atomic scale roughness at metal/insulator interfaces on metal work function.

We evaluate the performance of different van der Waals (vdW) corrected density functional theory (DFT) methods in predicting the structure of perfect interfaces between the LiF(001), MgO(001), NiO(001) films on the Ag(001) surface and the resulting work function shift of Ag(001). The results demonstrate that including the van der Waals interaction is important for obtaining accurate interface s...

Atomic Scale Structure of Sputtered Metal Multilayers

A combined theoretical and experimental approach has been used to study nanoscale CoFe/Cu/CoFe multilayer films grown by sputter deposition. Such films have applications in sensors that utilize the giant magnetoresistance effect, for example, read heads in high-density information storage devices. Atomistic simulations based on a molecular dynamics approach and an alloy form of the embedded ato...

Electrochemical properties of atomic-scale metal wires

We have fabricated atomic-scale metal wires with quantized conductance in electrolytes and studied double layer charging, anionic adsorption and surface stress effects on the quantum transport in the wires. In the double layer charging regime, the conductance changes linearly with the potential, which can be attributed to a change in the amount of electron spill-out of the wire. A large change ...

Friction at the Atomic Scale

Everyone learns the basics of friction in high-school physics classes: the friction force experienced by a sliding object is proportional to the normal force that an object exerts on a surface. Remarkably, this extremely simple and empirical relation, known as Amontons’ Law, is still often used in creating the most technologically sophisticated machines and devices, even though friction is know...