Atomic-Scale Imaging of the Surface Dipole Distribution of Stepped Surfaces

作者：Leon Carmen Perez^*; Drees Holger; Wippermann Stefan Martin; Marz Michael^*; Hoffmann Vogel Regina

来源：Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2016, 7(3): 426-430.

DOI：10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b02650

Stepped well-ordered semiconductor surfaces are important as nanotemplates for the fabrication of ID nanostructures. Therefore, a detailed understanding of the underlying stepped substrates is crucial for advances in this field. Although measurements of step edges are challenging for scanning force microscopy (SFM), here we present simultaneous atomically resolved SFM and Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM) images of a silicon vicinal surface. We find that the local contact potential difference is large at the bottom of the steps and at the restatoms on the terraces, whereas it drops at the upper part of the steps and at the adatoms on the terraces. For the interpretation of the data we performed density functional theory (DFT) calculations of the surface dipole distribution. The DFT images accurately reproduce the experiments even without including the tip in the calculations. This underlines that the high-resolution KPFM images are closely related to intrinsic properties of the surface and not only to tip-surface interactions.

• 出版日期2016-2-4