Résumé: A method of characterizing surfaces comprises the steps of:
directing a beam (2) of neutral atoms or molecules on a surface (3) for characterizing; and
detecting in position-sensitive manner the neutral atoms or molecules of said beam that have been diffused forwards by said surface (3) for characterizing;
the properties of said beam (2) being selected in such a manner that at least some of said neutral atoms or molecules that are diffused forwards are diffractive by said surface for characterizing.
A device for implementing such a method comprises means (1) for generating such a beam (2) of neutral atoms or molecules and position-sensitive detector means (4) for detecting the neutral atoms or molecules that are diffused forwards by said surface (3) for characterizing.
date de priorité: 7 juil. 2006
EP2044423A2, US20090250600, WO2008003865A2, WO2008003865A3

Résumé: We present a density-functional theory (DFT) study combined with scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) experiments of the chemisorption of the N,N'-bis(1-hexylheptyl) perylene-3,4:9,10-bis(dicarboximide) molecule, noted here as DHH-PTCDI, on the SiC(0001)-3 x 3 surface. Five possible adsorption configurations have been investigated in which molecular adsorption occurs on two adjacent Si adatoms via different pairs of atoms of the molecule. We have calculated the energies, structures, density of states, local density of states, and a calculated STM image and show that chemisorption via two oxygen atoms located on the same side of the molecule on two adjacent Si adatoms is the most favorable, in agreement with the experimental STM images. A comparison between the PTCDI and the adsorption of another large organic molecule (phthalocyanine) on the SiC(0001) surface completes this work.

Résumé: In biomedical and food industry, surface colonization by bacteria is harmful: it leads to biofilm formation, a microbial consortia more resistant to antibiotics than planktonic bacteria. In order to design materials able to limit the biofilm formation, the effect of bacteria on materials has to be well characterized. In this work, a well-defined surface composed of a self-assembled monolayer (SAM) of octadecanethiol (ODT) onto a gold surface is probed in situ. The SAM conformation is obtained using the femtosecond vibrational sum frequency generation (SFG) spectroscopy. This technique provides selectively the molecular vibrational signature of the interface. The behaviour of the ODT SAM is studied in different environments: in air, in water, and upon exposure to hydrophilic or hydrophobic Lactococcus lactis bacteria. Modelling the experimental SFG spectra reveals a measurable change of the SAM conformation which depends on the environment, especially on the hydrophilic-hydrophobic character.

Résumé: Electromagnetic coupling between plasmonic resonances in metallic nanoparticles allows for engineering of the optical response and generation of strong localized near-fields. Classical electrodynamics fails to describe this coupling across sub-nanometer gaps, where quantum effects become important owing to non-local screening and the spill-out of electrons. However, full quantum simulations are not presently feasible for realistically sized systems. Here we present a novel approach, the quantum-corrected model (QCM), that incorporates quantum-mechanical effects within a classical electrodynamic framework. The QCM approach models the junction between adjacent nanoparticles by means of a local dielectric response that includes electron tunnelling and tunnelling resistivity at the gap and can be integrated within a classical electrodynamical description of large and complex structures. The QCM predicts optical properties in excellent agreement with fully quantum mechanical calculations for small interacting systems, opening a new venue for addressing quantum effects in realistic plasmonic systems.

Résumé: The advent of milli-kelvin scanning tunneling microscopes (STM) with inbuilt magnetic fields has opened access to the study of magnetic phenomena with atomic resolution at surfaces. In the case of single atoms adsorbed on a surface, the existence of different magnetic energy levels localized on the adsorbate is due to the breaking of the rotational invariance of the adsorbate spin by the interaction with its environment, leading to energy terms in the meV range. These structures were revealed by STM experiments in IBM Almaden in the early 2000s for atomic adsorbates on CuN surfaces. The experiments consisted in the study of the changes in conductance caused by inelastic tunneling of electrons (IETS, inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy). Manganese and Iron adatoms were shown to have different magnetic anisotropies induced by the substrate. More experiments by other groups followed up, showing that magnetic excitations could be detected in a variety of systems: e.g. complex organic molecules showed that their magnetic anisotropy was dependent on the molecular environment, piles of magnetic molecules showed that they interact via intermolecular exchange interaction, spin waves were excited on ferromagnetic surfaces and in Mn chains, and magnetic impurities have been analyzed on semiconductors. These experiments brought up some intriguing questions: the efficiency of magnetic excitations was very high, the excitations could or could not involve spin flip of the exciting electron and singular-like behavior was sometimes found at the excitation thresholds. These facts called for extended theoretical analysis: perturbation theories, sudden-approximation approaches and a strong coupling scheme successfully explained most of the magnetic inelastic processes. In addition, many-body approaches were also used to decipher the interplay between inelastic processes and the Kondo effect. Spin torque transfer has been shown to be effective in changing spin orientations of an adsorbate in theoretical works, and soon after it was shown experimentally. More recently, the previously mentioned strong coupling approach was extended to treat the excitation of spin waves in atomic chains and the ubiquitous role of electron-hole pair creation in de-exciting spins on surfaces has been analyzed. This review article expounds these works, presenting the theoretical approach by the authors while trying to thoroughly review parallel theoretical and experimental works. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Résumé: Recent advances in attosecond spectroscopy techniques have fueled the interest in the theoretical description of electronic processes taking place in the subfemtosecond time scale. Here we study the coupled dynamic screening of a localized hole and a photoelectron emitted from a metal cluster using a semi-classical model. Electron density dynamics in the cluster is calculated with time-dependent density functional theory, and the motion of the photoemitted electron is described classically. We show that the dynamic screening of the hole by the cluster electrons affects the motion of the photoemitted electron. At the very beginning of its trajectory, the photoemitted electron interacts with the cluster electrons that pile up to screen the hole. Within our model, this gives rise to a significant reduction of the energy lost by the photoelectron. Thus, this is a velocity-dependent effect that should be accounted for when calculating the average losses suffered by photoemitted electrons in metals.

Résumé: Irradiation of non-luminescent silica with polarized IR femtosecond laser light produced a significant amount of luminescent defects. We have investigated the properties of luminescence produced by the defects using UV-VUV excitation experiment depending on the relative orientation of the laser polarization and its scanning direction. Silicon Oxygen Deficient Center (SiODC) is identified. SiODC related luminescence is much stronger when the excitation polarization is parallel to the sample scanning direction and moved at low velocity, regardless of the writing polarization direction. This indicates that the creation of this anisotropic defect is oriented by the movement of the femtosecond laser beam. (C)2012 Optical Society of America

Résumé: The adsorption and island formation of C-60 fullerenes on the hydrogenated C(100)-(2 x 1):H diamond surface is studied using high-resolution noncontact atomic force microscopy in ultrahigh vacuum. At room temperature, C-60 fullerene molecules assemble into monolayer islands, exhibiting a hexagonally close-packed internal structure. Dewetting is observed when raising the substrate temperature above approximately 505 K, resulting in two-layer high islands. In contrast to the monolayer islands, these double-layer islands form extended wetting layers. This peculiar behavior is explained by an increased molecule-substrate binding energy in the case of double-layer islands, which originates from charge transfer doping. Only upon further increasing the substrate temperature to approximately 615 K, the wetting layer desorbs, corresponding to a binding energy of the charge transfer-stabilized film of 1.7 eV.

Résumé: Using the model derived in paper I [G. Raseev, Eur. Phys. J. D 66, 167 (2012)], this work presents calculations of the photoelectron spectrum (PES) of low index aluminium surfaces in the 10-30 eV region. The laser is p or transverse magnetic linearly polarized incident on a flat structureless surface and its fields are modeled in I using the vector potential in the temporal gauge. This model uses a tensor and nonlocal isotropic (TNLI) susceptibility and solves the classical Ampere-Maxwell equation through the use of the vector potential from the electron density-coupled integro-differential equations (VPED-CIDE). The PE cross sections are the squares of the PE transition moments calculated using the VPED-CIDE vector potential function of the penetration coordinate. The PES is obtained in a one step model using either the Fermi golden rule or the Weisskopf-Wigner (WW) expressions. The WW cross section PES compares favorably with the experimental angle and energy resolved photoelectron yield (AERPY) spectrum of Levinson et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 43, 952 (1979)], Levinson and Plummer [Phys. Rev. B 24, 628 (1981)] for Al(001) and of Barman et al. [Phys. Rev. B 58, R4285 (1998)], Barman [Curr. Sci. 88, 54 (2005)] for Al(111) surfaces. As in the experiment, our theoretical AERPY displays the multipole surface plasmon resonance at 11.32/12.75 eV for Al(001)/Al(111), mainly due to the surface contribution vertical bar <psi(f)vertical bar p . A vertical bar psi(i)>vertical bar(2), the bulk plasmon minimum at 15 eV and the two single particle excitation resonances at about 16 and 22 eV. The nature of the plasmon resonances of the PES is analyzed using the reflectance, the electron density induced by the laser and Feibelman's parameter d(perpendicular to) all introduced in paper I.

Résumé: The dependence of the inelastic lifetime of electrons in the first n = 1 image-potential state of clean and rare-gas covered Ag(111), Cu(111), and Cu(100) surfaces on their momentum parallel to the surface has been studied experimentally by means of time-and angle-resolved two-photon photoemission spectroscopy (2PPE) and theoretically by calculations based on the many-body theory within the self-energy formalism. Similar to the previously studied clean Cu(100) surface, the theoretical results are in excellent agreement with the experiment findings for Cu(111). For Ag(111), the theory overestimates the decay rate and its momentum dependence, which is attributed to the neglect of surface plasmon excitations. With increasing parallel momentum, the n = 1 state shifts out of the projected bulk band gap on both surfaces and turns into an image-potential resonance. This opens an additional decay channel by resonant electron transfer into the bulk, which is theoretically treated by the application of the wave packet propagation approach. The expected stronger increase of the decay rate upon crossing the edge of the band gap, however, is not observed in the experiment. The decoupling of the image-potential states from the metal surface upon adsorption of rare-gas layers results in a decrease of the decay rate as well as of its momentum dependence by a similar factor, which can be successfully explained by the change of interband and intraband contributions to the total decay rate.

Résumé: For energetic atomic beams grazingly incident at a surface along low-index directions, the fast motion of the projectile in the surface plane and the slow motion in the direction perpendicular to the surface appear nearly decoupled. Fast-atom diffraction (FAD) experiments reveal two-dimensional (2D) diffraction patterns associated with exchange of the reciprocal vector perpendicular to the low-index direction of fast motion. These results are usually interpreted within the axial-channeling approximation, where the effective 2D potential experienced by the projectile is set as an average of the 3D surface potential along the atomic strings forming the channel. In this work, using the example of grazing scattering of He atoms at a LiF(001) surface, we address theoretically the range of validity of the axial-channeling approximation. Full quantum wave-packet-propagation calculations are used to study the transition from the 2D (fast atom) to the 3D diffraction pattern characteristic for low-energy atomic and molecular projectiles scattered from surfaces. Along with exact calculations, a semianalytical perturbative treatment based on the Lippmann-Schwinger equation allows an explanation of why the diffraction processes involving the exchange of reciprocal-lattice vectors along the fast-motion direction are exponentially small in typical FAD conditions.