The architect of several artists' homes, Jamie Fobert is now landing himself a string of acclaimed arts and commercial commissions. From his warehouse in Old Street in London, he explained to Howard Watson how the sensitive integrity of his architecture has developed out of ‘an inside‐out approach’, which puts particular store in ‘framing light and views’ and the sculpting of space aided by physical model‐making, rather than the synthetic top‐down views that are imposed by widely used CAD programs. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Si (110) clean surface has been reported to have a 16×2 structure with a pair of pentagons (PP) elemental structure in upper and lower terraces, and the stability of the structure has been explained using density functional theory (DFT). An et al. investigated the 16×2 structure in detail using high-resolution scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) and showed that the number of bright spots corresponding to the PP structure changes from 10 (positive bias) to 8 (negative bias). Togashi et al. investigated the initial oxidation of the 16×2 structure by using STM and showed that some sites in the PP structure were oxidized preferentially. In this study, STM images were simulated using DFT on a flat Si ( 110)-(8×2) surface of the adatom-tetramer-interstitial (ATI) model. The dependence of the simulated images on the sample bias was consistent with that reported by An et al. for experimentally obtained STM images. The simulated images were well explained by the calculated density of states. These results indicate that the ATI model can explain the atomic configuration of a Si (110)-(16×2) clean surface. Furthermore, STM images of stable O clusters around the elemental pair of pentagons structure in an initially oxidized Si (110)-(16×2) surface were obtained.

The initial stage of oxidation of an Si (110)-(1 × 1) surface was analyzed by using the first-principles calculation. Two calculation cells with different surface areas were prepared. In these cells, O atoms were located at the Si–Si bonds in the first layer (A-bonds) and at the Si–Si bonds between the first and second layers (B-bonds). We found that (i) the most stable site of one O atom was the A-bond, and (ii) an O (A-bond) –Si–O (A-bond) was the most stable for two O atoms with a coverage ratio of while an O (A-bond) –Si–O (B-bond) was the most stable for . The stability of O (A-bond) –Si–Si–O (A-bond) was less than the structures obtained in (ii). The other calculations showed that the unoxidized A-bonds should be left when a coverage ratio of is close to 1. These simulations suggest that the O atoms will form clusters in the initial stage of oxidation, and the preferential oxidation will change from the A-bonds to the B-bonds up to the formation of 1 monolayer (ML) oxide. The results obtained here support the reported experimental results.