Leaky atomic traps: Upward diffusion of Au from nanoscale pits on ionic-crystal surfaces

Molecular assemblies grown between metallic contacts on insulating surfaces

“…The clusters are homogeneously distributed over the terraces with an increased density at step edges, which is a well known phenomenon on alkali halides. [18][19][20] Several molecular wires are observed along the ͗110͘-directions growing from step edges as we already obtained on clean KBr surfaces. [4][5][6] The measurement also reveals a free standing wire, which is not touching a step at all.…”

Imaging the real shape of nanoclusters in scanning force microscopy

“…The force microscope in its dynamic mode ͑dynamic SFM͒ offers the possibility to image surfaces with a true atomic resolution, [11][12][13] and indeed, to a greater extent in recent years, the dynamic SFM has been used for the imaging of nanoclusters on many types of surfaces. [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] However, also in dynamic SFM, the tip-surface convolution strongly reduces the resolution during imaging of the nanoclusters in the standard topography mode. 19,25,26 Furthermore, the scanning speed is limited and does not exceed speeds much higher than ϳ1 − 2 Hz, which does not permit time-dependent measurements on short time scales--a particular problem for biophysical SPM studies.…”

Dynamics of the defect-mediated desorption of alkali halide surfaces

“…Similar type of desorption processes caused by electronic transitions has been found in another class of insulating materials, i.e., frozen rare gas solids [4,5]. More recently, such desorption processes have been applied for controlled nanostructuring of wide band gap insulators with the aim of fabricating templates for depositing metal and/or molecular structures fully decoupled electronically from the supporting substrate [6]. In fact, alkali halides nanostructured by electrons have already been used as templates for metal clusters, as well as complex molecule deposition and immobilization [7][8][9].…”