Reversed anisotropies and thermal contraction of FCC (110) surfaces

113 Surface Thermal Expansion

The creation of a surface breaks the translational symmetry of the bulk with the electrons redistributing to lower their energy, resulting in a new lattice structure. Surface relaxation and reconstruction have been studied for years, and it is generally assumed that theory and experiment are in fairly good agreement for the ground state properties at a metal surface. There is a conceptual pictu...

Adatom ascending at step edges and faceting on fcc metal (110) surfaces.

Using first-principles total-energy calculations, we show that an adatom can easily climb up at monatomic-layer-high steps on several representative fcc metal (110) surfaces via a place exchange mechanism. Inclusion of such novel adatom ascending processes in kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of Al(110) homoepitaxy as a prototypical model system can lead to the existence of an intriguing faceting...

Instability and wavelength selection during step flow growth of metal surfaces vicinal to fcc(001).

We study the onset and development of ledge instabilities during growth of vicinal metal surfaces using kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. We observe the formation of periodic patterns at [110] close packed step edges on surfaces vicinal to fcc(001) under realistic molecular beam epitaxy conditions. The corresponding wavelength and its temperature dependence are studied in detail. Simulations sug...

Theory of alkali-metal-induced reconstruction of fcc (110) surfaces.

Electronic structure of fcc and bcc close-packed silver surfaces.

We report results of total energy and electronic structure calculations of fcc and bcc silver bulk and surfaces. We find that under normal conditions (positive pressure) bcc silver is not stable. However, if silver is grown with a volume per atom & 10% larger than that of the well-known fcc silver, the total energy of the bcc structure becomes below that of fcc silver. For bcc (110) a surface s...