Search

Highly corrugated, stepped surfaces present regular 1D arrays of binding sites, creating a complex, heterogeneous environment to water. Rather than decorating the hydrophilic step sites to form 1D chains, water on stepped Cu(511) forms an extended 2D network that binds strongly to the steps but bridges across the intervening hydrophobic Cu(100) terraces. The hydrogen-bonded network contains pentamer, hexamer, and octomer water rings that leave a third of the stable Cu step sites unoccupied in order to bind water H down close to the step dipole and complete three hydrogen bonds per molecule.

We followed the collective atomic-scale motion of Na atoms on a vicinal Cu(115) surface within a time scale of pico to nano-seconds using helium spin echo spectroscopy. The well defined stepped structure of Cu(115) allows us to study the effect that atomic steps have on the adsorption properties, the rate for motion parallel and perpendicular to the step edge and the interaction between the Na atoms. With the support of a molecular dynamics simulation we show that the Na atoms perform strongly anisotropic one dimensional hopping motion parallel to the step edges. Furthermore, we observe that the spatial and temporal correlations between the Na atoms which lead to collective motion are also anisotropic, suggesting the steps efficiently screen the lateral interaction between Na atoms residing on different terraces., 3 figures

In this manuscript we report helium atom scattering (HAS) measurements of the structure of the first H2O layer on Au(111). The interaction between H2O and Au(111) is believed to be particularly weak and conflicting evidence from several indirect studies has suggested that water either grows as 3D ice crystals or as an amorphous wetting layer. In contrast, our measurements show that between 110K and 130K, H2O grows as highly commensurate well ordered islands which only partially wet the gold surface. The islands produce a clear (sqrt3Xsqrt3)R30 diffraction pattern and are characterized by a well defined height of ~ 5 Angstrom with respect to the surface gold atoms. These findings provide support for a unique double bilayer model which has recently been suggested for this surface.