Polar-step Driven Metal Nucleation and Growth: The Ag/ZnO(1010) Case

International audience; The morphology, epitaxy, band-alignment and optical response of silver nanoparticles on ZnO(1010) has been analysed by microscopy, photoemission, electron diraction and dier-ential reectivity. At 700 K, clusters tend to nu-cleate and grow exclusively along [010]-oriented polar steps and corners, and not on at terraces or non-polar [001] steps. This preference leads to a specic epitaxy Ag(111)[110] ZnO[010](1010) with a large lattice mismatch along the dense row of the metal. The experiments have been rationalized through ab ini-tio simulations. A much lower adsorption energy is obtained for the O-terminated steps with a charge transfer from silver to oxygen, that corroborates the variation of ionization energy observed in photoemission and the presence of cationic silver. This anisotropy of growth reverberates in the plasmonic response of the metallic particles. The growth and epitaxy of metals on the polar (0001) and non-polar (1010) ori-entations of ZnO is discussed in terms of sur-face/step polarity compensation in the light of the present ndings.