Anomalous fast dynamics of adsorbate overlayers near an incommensurate structural transition

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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

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en

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Physical Review Letters, Volume 111, issue 12, pp. 1-5

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We investigate the dynamics of a compressively strained adsorbed layer on a periodic substrate via a simple two-dimensional model that admits striped and hexagonal incommensurate phases. We show that the mass transport is superfast near the striped-hexagonal phase boundary and in the hexagonal phase. For an initial step profile separating a bare substrate region (or “hole”) from the rest of a striped incommensurate phase, the superfast domain wall dynamics leads to a bifurcation of the initial step profile into two interfaces or profiles propagating in opposite directions with a hexagonal phase in between. This yields a theoretical understanding of the recent experiments for the Pb/Si(111) system.

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Granato, E, Ying, S C, Elder, K & Ala-Nissilä, T 2013, 'Anomalous fast dynamics of adsorbate overlayers near an incommensurate structural transition', Physical Review Letters, vol. 111, no. 12, 126102, pp. 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.126102