RESUMEN
In this work, ethanol is used as a chemical probe to study the passivation of molecular beam epitaxy-grown GaN(0001) by surface oxidation. With a high degree of oxidation, no reaction from ethanol to acetaldehyde in temperature-programmed desorption experiments is observed. The acetaldehyde formation is attributed to a mechanism based on α-H abstraction from the dissociatively bound alcohol molecule. The reactivity is related to negatively charged surface states, which are removed upon oxidation of the GaN(0001) surface. This is compared with the Ga2O3(2¯01) single crystal surface, which is found to be inert for the acetaldehyde production. These results offer a toolbox to explore the surface chemistry of nitrides and oxynitrides on an atomic scale and relate their intrinsic activity to systems under ambient atmosphere.
RESUMEN
Time resolution is one of the most severe limitations of scanning probe microscopies (SPMs), since the typical image acquisition times are in the order of several seconds or even few minutes. As a consequence, the characterization of dynamical processes occurring at surfaces (e.g. surface diffusion, film growth, self-assembly and chemical reactions) cannot be thoroughly addressed by conventional SPMs. To overcome this limitation, several years ago we developed a first prototype of the FAST module, an add-on instrument capable of driving a commercial scanning tunneling microscope (STM) at and beyond video rate frequencies. Here we report on a fully redesigned version of the FAST module, featuring improved performance and user experience, which can be used both with STMs and atomic force microscopes (AFMs), and offers additional capabilities such as an atom tracking mode. All the new features of the FAST module, including portability between different commercial instruments, are described in detail and practically demonstrated.