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Updated: Jun 26, 2026

All-electronic Nanosecond-resolved Scanning Tunneling Microscopy: Facilitating the Investigation of Single Dopant Charge Dynamics
Published on: January 19, 2018
Electronic nature of step-edge barriers against adatom descent on transition-metal surfaces
Yina Mo1, Wenguang Zhu, Efthimios Kaxiras
1Department of Physics and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Abstract:
By studying a series of adatoms on representative transition-metal surfaces through first-principles calculations, we establish a clear correlation between the preferred mechanism and activation energy for adatom descent at a step and the relative degree of electronic shell filling of the adatom and the substrate. We also find an approximate linear relation between the adatom step-edge hopping barriers and the adatom-surface bonding strength with slope roughly proportional to the number of the adatom's nearest neighbors initially. These results may serve as simple guiding rules for predicting precise atomic surface morphologies in heteroepitaxial growth, as in formation of nanowires.
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