Gold deposited on the Fe3O4(001) surface at room temperature was studied using Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). This surface forms a (2×2)R45∘ reconstruction, where pairs of Fe and neighboring O ions are slightly displaced laterally producing undulating rows with `narrow' and `wide' hollow sites. At low coverages, single Au adatoms adsorb exclusively at the narrow sites, with no significant sintering up to annealing temperatures of 400 ∘C. We propose the strong site preference to be related to charge and orbital ordering within the first subsurface layer of Fe3O4(001)-(2×2)R45∘. Due to its high thermal stability, this could prove an ideal model system for probing the chemical reactivity of single atomic species.
@article{arxiv.1205.0915,
title = {Ordered Array of Single Adatoms with Remarkable Thermal Stability: Au/Fe3O4(001)},
author = {Zbyněk Novotný and Giacomo Argentero and Zhiming Wang and Michael Schmid and Ulrike Diebold and Gareth S. Parkinson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.0915},
year = {2012}
}
Comments
5 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1203.5850