Nanospectroscopy highlights

Spontaneous formation of periodic patterns is an example of nature's tendency towards order. A class of such structures is induced by surface stress, and has been widely observed on single crystal surfaces. It is well known that the formation of these equilibrium patterns is driven by a competition between interactions at different length scales. The forces in action, due to short-range near-neighbour and long-range dipolar interactions, are of the most general type resulting in very similar phenomena occurring also in magnetic and electrostatic systems. Here, we explore the possibility of controlling the thermal fluctuations by adding a second adspecies to an already stripe-forming system. The idea is based on the slow dynamics in a high-density

binary lattice gas, which leads to a tendency towards glassy behaviour. In particular, we implement this by dosing small amounts of oxygen on submonolayer Pd/W(110).

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Stress engineering at the nanometer scale: Two-component adlayer stripes;
T.O. Menteş, N. Stojic, A. Locatelli, L. Aballe, N. Binggeli, M.Á. Niño, M. Kiskinova, E. Bauer; EPL (Europhysics Letters), 94 (3), 38003 (2011).
doi: 10.1209/0295-5075/94/38003.