Abstract
Self-assembled rare-earth (RE) silicide nanowires (NWs) on semiconductor surfaces are considered as good candidates for creating and investigating one-dimensional electron systems because of their exceptionally anisotropic growth behavior and metallic property. While detailed atomic structures are essential to understand electronic properties of these NWs, there have been only few successful observations of atomic structures with microscopy and reliable structure models are lacking. Here, we reinvestigate gadolinium silicide NWs with high resolution scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). We observe several different structures of Gd silicide NWs depending systematically on their widths, which consist of two distinct structural elements along the wires. The structure of a wide wire can be understood from that of a two dimensional silicide. Based on these STM observations, we propose new structure models of Gd silicide NWs.
Highlights
The extreme downscaling of integrated circuit dimensions makes great demands on alternative fabrication approaches in the scale of few nanometers
We reinvestigate the atomic structure of Gd silicide NWs with high resolution scanning tunneling microscopy (STM)
Self-assembled Gd silicide NWs are grown on a clean Si(100) surface by depositing Gd atoms and high-resolution STM images reveal their atomic structures with unprecedented resolution and details
Summary
The extreme downscaling of integrated circuit dimensions makes great demands on alternative fabrication approaches in the scale of few nanometers. A variety of phases of RE silicide NW systems and the coverage dependent growth behavior have been reported extensively in previous studies[11,17,18,19,20]. Their uni-directional growth with an extremely high aspect ratio results from a huge anisotropy in the lattice mismatch between the RE silicide and the Si(001) substrate[11]. Based on our experimental findings, we propose new atomic models explaining the whole structures observed consistently[13,16]
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