Photoemission study of vanadium deposition on Si(100)2 × 1

Vanadium nanoclusters on Si(111) 7×7 surface studied by scanning tunneling microscopy

“…1 inset) showing clearly the six spots arising from the 7 · 7 periodicity. Indeed, the nanocluster formation might be attributed to an early stage of island growth, an experimental finding which is in contrast to a layer-bylayer growth mode as proposed in previous studies [21,26]. After vanadium evaporation at room temperature up to about 1 ML no new LEED superstructure could be seen, however the initially sharp 7 · 7 pattern became increasingly diffuse.…”

“…The asymmetry observed might origin from both, the atomic structure of the silicide cluster and the corresponding substrate lattice mismatch, and/or diffusion limited mechanisms, respectively. In our experiments we could not identify directly the composition of the silicide clusters, however, in experiments conducted under similar conditions the vanadium disilicide formation has been proven [6,7,21,[23][24][25][26]. Providing, the (B) type clusters consist also of VSi 2 composition, we compared the cluster atomic structure observed in Fig.…”

“…Although several reports on this system are already available, including the study of the growth phenomena ranging from few monolayers [14,21,22] up to thick V-silicide films [23][24][25] and elucidation of their chemical reactions [26], structure [27] and electronic properties [28,29], a detailed microscopic investigation of the early stage of the V/Si(1 1 1) growth and interface formation has not been yet performed.…”