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Atomically Defined Templates for Epitaxial Growth of Complex Oxide Thin Films
Published on: December 4, 2014
Two-dimensional roughening of adsorbate islands in thermodynamic equilibrium
J Wintterlin1, J Trost, R Schuster
1Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, 14195 Berlin, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 80331 München, Germany.
Abstract:
Equilibrium fluctuations of islands of adsorbed O atoms on Ru(0001) were investigated by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), density functional theory calculations (DFT) and Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. Very ramified (2 x 2)-O islands were observed by high-speed STM that point to complex interactions between the O atoms. The DFT calculations show that, in addition to pairwise attractive interactions between third-nearest neighbors, a repulsive three-body interaction exists between these. MC simulations that include three-body interactions reproduce the observed ordering behavior.
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