Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Douat, Benjamin
• Colin, Jérôme
• Bergamaschini, Roberto
• Montalenti, Francesco
• Drouet, Michel
• Bonneville, Joël
• Coupeau, Christophe

Titel

Slip trace-induced terrace erosion

Ist Teil von

• Applied surface science, 2019-02, Vol.466, p.454-458

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier B.V

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •Experimental observations of the interaction between slip traces and vicinal steps on Nb(111) surface.•Evidence of terrace erosion due to emerging dislocations.•modeling of the step evolution due to adatom diffusion.•suggestion of a mechanism of erosion by step meander formation. We have investigated the interaction between slip traces and vicinal steps on the Nb(111) surface under increasing external strain. By exploiting an extended scanning tunneling microscopy analysis, we here show that emerging dislocations at the free-surface can induce the full disappearance of atomic terraces. To shed light on the observed behavior, we have modeled the elastic interaction between a screw dislocation and a vicinal step in the actual experimental configuration. After computing the adatom chemical potential, we show that strain-mediated diffusion on surface causes step erosion, possibly leading to vanishing of full terraces.