Yb and Nd growth on Si()

Self-assembled lead atomic nanowires on pre-structured Sm/Si(111) interfaces

“…These results lead to the formation of so-called atomic nanowires. Other authors [4][5][6][7][8][9][10] reported that thicker 1D nanowires of rare earth metal silicides (i.e. Dy, Ho, Er) on Si(1 0 0) surface can be grown under certain thermal conditions.…”

Formation of ytterbium silicide film on Si(001) by solid-phase epitaxy

“…Finally, we note that the SPE-grown Yb silicide islands (Figs. 3 and 4) are drastically different in shape from those found after Yb deposition onto a heated Si at 600 C [15]. Thus, these results emphasize that the morphology of Yb silicide film on Si(0 0 1) can be strongly affected by the growth technique.…”

“…Comparison of the LEED patterns observed for clean sample (a) and 0.9-ML Yb-covered sample (b) suggests that Yb destroys the initial structure on clean Si(0 0 1)2 Â 1 surface and stabilizes the 2D reconstruction with 1 Â 5 periodicity. It is also different from the 2 Â 3, 2 Â 4 and 2 Â 6 reconstructions formed at lower submonolayer coverages (p1/2 ML) [15,18]. Note that the LEED spots in Fig.…”

“…It was shown that the formation of such nanowires is favored by epitaxial relationship of hexagonal silicide and Si(0 0 1) surface lattices, where the ½1 1 % 2 0 and [0 0 0 1] silicide axes lie in the substrate surface plane and are aligned along the [1 1 0] Si directions. In particular, the long nanowires were reported recently for Dy [6,[8][9][10], Er [7,[10][11][12], Ho [8,13], and Gd [10,14] that provide a very low lattice mismatch along the [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] axis (about 1% or below) and much larger mismatch along the [0 0 0 1] axis (about 7%). In contrast, Nd silicide is poorly matched with Si(0 0 1) along the both axes, yielding the formation of compact 3D islands [15].…”

“…They concluded that the surface silicide phase is well ordered with the 3 Â 1 periodicity upon annealing at 640 C, even for very high film thickness (500 ( A). However, Katkov and Nogami showed that the (3 Â 1) LEED pattern originates from the Yb-induced reconstruction of Si substrate and cannot be associated with Yb silicide islands in any way, at least in the coverage range up to 3.4 ML [15]. Thus, there is so far no consensus about the atomic arrangement of Yb silicide phase on Si(0 0 1).…”