IUVSTA 15th International Vacuum Congress (IVC-15), AVS 48th International Symposium (AVS-48), 11th International Conference on Solid Surfaces (ICSS-11)
    Surface Science Wednesday Sessions
       Session SS1-WeM

Invited Paper SS1-WeM1
Diffusion on and in Surfaces: The Atomic Slide Puzzle

Wednesday, October 31, 2001, 8:20 am, Room 120

Session: Surface Diffusion
Presenter: J.W.M. Frenken, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Authors: J.W.M. Frenken, Leiden University, The Netherlands
R. Van Gastel, Leiden University, The Netherlands
E. Somfai, Leiden University, The Netherlands
S.B. Van Albada, Leiden University, The Netherlands
W. Van Saarloos, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Correspondent: Click to Email
Usually, surface mobility is thought to be restricted completely to the steps and kinks on crystal surfaces. These sites form the natural locations for atoms to come and go. Atoms in the close-packed terraces are often considered to be completely static, since they are tightly packed by their neighbors. In this talk, measurements will be shown that have been obtained with the scanning tunneling microscope, that show that a close-packed terrace of a metal surface can be far from static, even at temperatures as low as room temperature! We make the motion visible of the atoms in a Cu(001) terrace, by embedding a low density of In atoms in the first Cu layer. The peculiar characteristics of the motion of the In show that the diffusion of surface vacancies is responsible for a continual reshuffling of all the (In and Cu) atoms in the first layer.@footnote 1@,@footnote 2@ @FootnoteText@ @footnote 1@ R. van Gastel, E. Somfai, W. van Saarloos and J.W.M. Frenken, Nature 408 (2001) 665. @footnote 2@ R. van Gastel, E. Somfai, S.B. van Albada, W. van Saarloos and J.W.M. Frenken, Phys.Rev.Lett. 86 (2001) 1562.