Strain engineering tunable nanotemplates on the Cu(110)-(2 x 1)-O surface

We present an STM study on the domain pattern formation of the Cu(110)-O surface. We found that the separation of the oxygen adsorbate phase into the domain pattern is consistent with a phenomenological model of size-dependent elastic relaxation of the strained surface. We developed a thermally assisted oxygen adsorption procedure aiming to control the size of the two-dimensional (2x1)-O islands nucleated at the surface under oxygen adsorption serving as precursors for domain pattern formation. We engineered wide range tuneable (2x1)-O domain patterns by controlling the nuclei size and the oxygen coverage at the pattern formation stage. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.