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Lifting surface reconstruction of Au (100) by tellurium adsorption

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Abstract

The Au (100) surface has been a subject of intense studies due to excellent catalytic activities and its model character for surface science. However, the spontaneous surface reconstruction buries active Au (100) plane and limits practical applications, and how to controllably eliminate the surface reconstruction over large scale remains challenging. Here, we experimentally and theoretically demonstrate that simple decoration of the Au (100) surface by tellurium (Te) atoms can uniquely lift its reconstruction over large scale. Scanning tunneling microscopy imaging reveals that the lifting of surface reconstruction preferentially starts from the boundaries of distinct domains and then extends progressively into the domains with the reconstruction rows perpendicular to the boundaries, leaving a Au (100)−(1 × 1) surface behind. The Au (100)−(1 × 1) is saturated at ∼ 84% ± 2% with respect to the whole surface at a Te coverage of 0.16 monolayer. With further increasing the Te coverage to 0.25 monolayer, the Au (100)−(1 × 1) surface becomes reduced and overlapped by a well-ordered (2 × 2)-Te superstructure. No similar behavior is found for Te-decorated Au (111), Cu (111), and Cu (100) surfaces, nor for the decorated Au (100) with other elements. This result may pave the way to design Au-based catalysts and, as an intermediate step, even potentially open a new route to constructing complex transition metal dichalcogenides.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 1210040808), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Nos. BK20210312 and BK20212008), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2019YFA0705400), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Nos. NJ2022002, NZ2020001, and NS2022014), the Program for Innovative Talents and Entrepreneur in Jiangsu, Research Fund of State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures (Nos. MCMS-I-0419G02 and MCMS-I-0421K01), and a project funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions.

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Author notes

  1. Erwen Zhang and Huan Lu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory for Intelligent Nano Materials and Devices of the Ministry of Education, State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures, Institute for Frontier Science, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210016, China

    Erwen Zhang, Huan Lu, Wei Zhang, Shuiyan Cao, Yang Wang, Rong Rong, Zhuhua Zhang, Yanpeng Liu & Wanlin Guo

  2. College of Jincheng, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210016, China

    Ying Liu

  3. Department of Applied Physics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Hong Kong, China

    Ming Yang

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  1. Erwen Zhang
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Correspondence to Ming Yang, Yanpeng Liu or Wanlin Guo.

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Zhang, E., Lu, H., Zhang, W. et al. Lifting surface reconstruction of Au (100) by tellurium adsorption. Nano Res. 16, 6967–6973 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-023-5461-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-023-5461-0

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