Incommensurate epitaxial growth of Cu on Pd{111}

Abstract

A low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) study of the growth of Cu on Pd{111} shows that the Cu films are epitaxial but are incommensurate with the substrate and have the equilibrium fcc Cu structure, in contrast to the growth on Pd{001}, where the Cu films are both epitaxial and pseudomorphic. The different behavior of the growth of the same material on two different surfaces of the same substrate is probably due to different magnitudes of the ratio of adatom-adatom interactions to the adatom-substrate interactions on the two surfaces.