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The energy landscape of glassy dynamics on the amorphous hafnium diboride surface

Direct visualization of the dynamics of structural glasses and amorphous solids on the sub-nanometer scale provides rich information unavailable from bulk or conventional single molecule techniques. We study the surface of hafnium diboride, a conductive ultrahigh temperature ceramic material that ca...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of chemical physics 2014-11, Vol.141 (20), p.204501-204501
Main Authors: Nguyen, Duc, Mallek, Justin, Cloud, Andrew N, Abelson, John R, Girolami, Gregory S, Lyding, Joseph, Gruebele, Martin
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Direct visualization of the dynamics of structural glasses and amorphous solids on the sub-nanometer scale provides rich information unavailable from bulk or conventional single molecule techniques. We study the surface of hafnium diboride, a conductive ultrahigh temperature ceramic material that can be grown in amorphous films. Our scanning tunneling movies have a second-to-hour dynamic range and single-point current measurements extend that to the millisecond-to-minute time scale. On the a-HfB2 glass surface, two-state hopping of 1-2 nm diameter cooperatively rearranging regions or "clusters" occurs from sub-milliseconds to hours. We characterize individual clusters in detail through high-resolution (
ISSN:0021-9606
1089-7690
DOI:10.1063/1.4901132