Submonolayer growth of Ag on Cu(111) studied by proton induced Auger electron spectroscopy

Abstract

We studied the growth of Ag on Cu(111) by electron- and proton-induced Auger electron spectroscopy. The Auger signal versus coverage plots indicate a growth in a monolayer-by-monolayer fashion. In case of grazingly incident protons, additional information on the real mesoscopic structure in the submonolayer coverage range could be obtained by comparison of the experimental results with computer simulations. We found good agreement for Ag islands growing from Cu step edges.