“…Films have the invaluable advantage that they can be prepared in a very clean and electrically conductive fashion and, in addition, be grown by epitaxy in a certain desired crystallographic orientation forced by the lattice parameters of the host surface. In the recent literature there are some detailed reports on the growth and structure of thin titanium dioxide films grown on Ni, Pt, Mo, W, Ru and Re surfaces, [16,17,41,[63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74] which we consider in somewhat more detail below. Surface-analytical methods employed were, among others, LEED, Auger electron spectroscopy (AES), ion scattering, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), STM, surface X-ray diffraction and photoemission.…”