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A combination of angle-resolved photoemission and scanning tunneling microscopy is used to explore the possibilities for tailoring the electronic structure of gold atom chains on silicon surfaces. It is shown that the interchain coupling and the band filling can be adjusted systematically by varying the step spacing via the tilt angle from Si͑111͒. Planes with odd Miller indices are stabilized by chains of gold atoms. Metallic bands and Fermi surfaces are observed. These findings suggest that atomic chains at stepped semiconductor substrates make a highly flexible class of solids approaching the one-dimensional limit.

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It has been a long-standing goal to create magnetism in a non-magnetic material by manipulating its structure at the nanoscale. Many structural defects have unpaired spins; an ordered arrangement of these can create a magnetically ordered state. In this article we predict theoretically that stepped silicon surfaces stabilized by adsorbed gold achieve this state by selfassembly, creating chains of polarized electron spins with atomically precise structural order. The spins are localized at silicon step edges having the form of graphitic ribbons. The predicted magnetic state is supported by recent experimental observations, such as the coexistence of double-and triple-period distortions and the absence of edge states in photoemission. Ordered arrays of surface spins can be accessed by probes with single-spin sensitivity, such as spinpolarized scanning tunnelling microscopy. The integration of structural and magnetic order is crucial for technologies involving spin-based computation and storage at the atomic level.

It has been proposed that the Si(557)-Au surface exhibits spin-charge separation in a one-dimensional electron liquid. Two narrowly spaced bands are found which exhibit a well-defined splitting at the Fermi level. That is incompatible with the assignment to a spinon-holon pair in a Luttinger liquid. Instead, we propose that the two bands are associated with two nearly degenerate atomic chains, or a chain of step atoms with two broken bonds. Such an assignment explains why the surface is metallic despite an even number of electrons per unit cell.