Noncontact Atomic Force Microscopy Observation of Fe3O4(001) Surface

概要

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Fe3O4 is one of the important oxide materials and its surface structure should be well understood to enable application of this material. We report the first noncontact atomic force microscopy (NC-AFM) results for Fe3O4(001) thin films. The observed films were grown homoepitaxially on magnetite thin films substrate. A low-energy electron diffraction pattern shows the well-known (\sqrt{2}\times \sqrt{2})R45° reconstructed structure. The observed minimum step height is 0.21 nm, corresponding to the distance between the same planes. We obtain two types of atomic-scale NC-AFM images. One image shows bright protrusions along the [100] and [010] directions at intervals of 0.84 nm corresponding to a unit cell of the (\sqrt{2}\times \sqrt{2})R45° reconstructed structure. The other image shows a more detailed atomic structure with 0.6 and 0.3 nm corrugations.
2012-08-25