Related papers: Surface terraces in pure tungsten formed by high-t…
Tungsten, a plasma-facing material for future fusion reactors, may be exposed to air during abnormal operation or accidents. Only limited information is available on the evolution of related oxide phases. This work addresses the effect of…
Water vapour atmospheres with content equivalent to the Earth's oceans, resulting from impacts or a high insolation, were found to yield a surface magma ocean. This was, however, a consequence of assuming a fully convective structure. Here…
The oxidation of pure W and the sublimation of W oxide have been investigated to assess their impact on the lifecycle of a fusion power plant. Pure W has been oxidised at temperatures between 400 and 1050C and for durations ranging between…
Copper-based catalysts play a crucial role in industrial oxidation reactions. Although many theoretical studies consider copper to be metallic, it is well established that copper readily oxides at ambient conditions, forming a passivating…
The possible formation of oxides or thin oxide films (surface oxides) on late transition metal surfaces is recently being recognized as an essential ingredient when aiming to understand catalytic oxidation reactions under technologically…
We have used scanning tunneling microscopy to study the growth of graphene on a periodically stepped Ir(332) substrate surface, which is a promising route for modification of graphene properties. We have found that graphene continuously…
Using a CO$_2$ laser to directly heat the crystals from the back side, SrTiO$_3$ substrates may be thermally prepared in situ for epitaxy without the need for ex-situ etching and annealing. We find that the formation of large terraces with…
The formation of ultrathin oxide layers on metal surfaces is a non-thermally-activated process which takes place spontaneously at very low temperatures within nanoseconds. This paper reports mechanistic details of the initial oxidation of…
It is becoming clear that the atmospheres of the young, self-luminous extrasolar giant planets imaged to date are dusty. Planets with dusty atmospheres may exhibit detectable amounts of linear polarization in the near-infrared, as has been…
Tungsten is a leading candidate material for plasma-facing components in future fusion reactors. Extensive studies have been performed to better understand its behavior under irradiation. Recent experiments of Rutherford backscattering…
We report a computational discovery of novel grain boundary structures and multiple grain boundary phases in elemental bcc tungsten. While grain boundary structures created by the \gamma-surface method as a union of two perfect half…
Systematic studies of the two high-temperature monolayer oxygen structures that exist on the (110) tungsten surface were performed using low-energy electron microscopy and diffraction measurements. Our work questions the commonly accepted…
We study the effect of thermal fluctuations in the XY-model on a surface with non vanishing mean curvature and zero Gaussian curvature. Unlike Gaussian curvature that typically frustrates orientational order, the extrinsic curvature of the…
The nucleation of graphene on a transition metal (TM) surface, either on a terrace or near a step edge, is systematically explored using density functional theory (DFT) calculations and applying the two-dimensional (2D) crystal nucleation…
If metal surfaces are exposed to sufficiently oxygen-rich environments, oxides start to form. Important steps in this process are the dissociative adsorption of oxygen at the surface, the incorporation of O atoms into the surface, the…
High temperatures promote kinetic processes which can drive crystal synthesis towards ideal thermodynamic conditions, thereby realizing samples of superior quality. While accessing very high temperatures in thin-film epitaxy is becoming…
Surface convection is important for the presence of magnetic activity at stars. So far, this convection is thought to be a result of heating from below, where convection cells rise and break up. New models reveal that surface convection is…
A fluid droplet may exhibit self-propelled motion by modifying the wetting properties of the substrate. We propose a novel model for droplet propagation upon a terraced landscape of ordered layers formed as a result of surface freezing…
The effect produced by surface defects on grazing-incidence fast atom diffraction (GIFAD) patterns is studied by considering the presence of terraces in a LiF(001) sample. For helium atoms impinging along the <110> direction of the LiF…
Surface diffusion on metal oxides is key in many areas of materials technology, yet it has been scarcely explored at the atomic scale. This work provides phenomenological insights from scanning tunneling microscopy on the link between…