StressReliefinReconstruction-UMDPhysics.pdfVIP

VOLUME 78, NUMBER 22 P H Y S I C A L R E V I E W L E T T E R S 2 JUNE 1997 Stress Relief in Reconstruction Claudia E. Bach, Margret Giesen, and Harald Ibach Institut für Grenzflächenforschung und Vakuumphysik, Forschungszentrum Jülich, D-52425 Jülich, Germany T. L. Einstein Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742-4111 (Received 18 November 1996) We report on the first direct measurement of the change of the surface stress in the reconstruction of the Au(111) and the Au(100) surfaces. For both surfaces the reconstruction relaxes the intrinsic tensile stress, by 22% and 5%, respectively. A discussion of the data on the Au(111) surface in the Frenkel- Kontorova model shows that the energy gain due to the surface stress is not quite large enough to make the reconstructed phase energetically favored without the formation of the secondary herringbone structure of the solitons. On the Au(100) surface, the gain in elastic strain energy is clearly insufficient to cause the surface to reconstruct. [S0031-9007(97)03238-9] PACS numbers: 68.35.Bs, 47.20.Dr, 61.16.Ch, 82.45.+z The (111) surfaces of the fcc transition metals Pt and obtained for the Ir(100) surface [16]. However, neither Au and the (100) surfaces of Ir, Pt, and Au are known to theory nor experiment could determine the change in the reconstruct to surface layers of higher density [1]. On the surface stress quantitatively. Without d