Controlling the Polarity of the Molecular Beam Epitaxy Grown In-Bi Atomic Film on the Si(111) Surface

• Published in: Scientific reports 2019-01, Vol.9 (1), p.756-756, Article 756
• Main Authors: Lin, Cho-Ying, Hsu, Chia-Hsiu, Huang, Yu-Zhang, Hsieh, Shih-Ching, Chen, Han-De, Huang, Li, Huang, Zhi-Quan, Chuang, Feng-Chuan, Lin, Deng-Sung
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 119/118; 140/146; 639/301/357/1018; 639/925/357/1018; Epitaxy; Humanities and Social Sciences; Molecular beam epitaxy; multidisciplinary; Polarity; Scanning tunneling microscopy; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Spectroscopy; Surface properties
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-37051-2

Synchrotron radiation core-level photoemission spectroscopy, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), and first-principles calculations have been utilized to explore the growth processes and the atomic structure of the resulting films during the two-step molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) of In and Bi on the Si(111) surface. Deposition of 1.0-ML Bi on the In/Si(111)-(4 × 1) surface at room temperature results in Bi-terminated BiIn-(4 × 3) structures, which are stable up to ~300 °C annealing. By contrast, deposition of In on the β-Bi/Si(111)-(√3 × √3) surface at room temperature results in three dimensional (3D) In islands. In both cases, annealing at 460 °C results in the same In-terminated In 0.75 Bi/Si(111)-(2 × 2) surface. Our DFT calculations confirm that the surface energy of In-terminated In 0.75 Bi/Si(111)-(2 × 2) system is lower than that of Bi-terminated Bi 0.75 In/Si(111)-(2 × 2). These findings provide means for the control of the polarity of the MBE In-Bi atomically thick films.