A sustainable ultra-high strength Fe18Mn3Ti maraging steel through controlled solute segregation and α-Mn nanoprecipitation.

The enormous magnitude of 2 billion tons of alloys produced per year demands a change in design philosophy to make materials environmentally, economically, and socially more sustainable. This disqualifies the use of critical elements that are rare or have questionable origin. Amongst the major alloy strengthening mechanisms, a high-dispersion of second-phase precipitates with sizes in the nanometre range is particularly effective for achieving ultra-high strength. Here, we propose an alternative segregation-based strategy for sustainable steels, free of critical elements, which are rendered ultrastrong by second-phase nano-precipitation. We increase the Mn-content in a supersaturated, metastable Fe-Mn solid solution to trigger compositional fluctuations and nano-segregation in the bulk. These fluctuations act as precursors for the nucleation of an unexpected α-Mn phase, which impedes dislocation motion, thus enabling precipitation strengthening. Our steel outperforms most common commercial alloys, yet it is free of critical elements, making it a new platform for sustainable alloy design.

Nonclassical "explosive" nucleation in Pb/Si(111) at low temperatures.

Classically, the onset of nucleation is defined in terms of a critical cluster of the condensed phase, which forms from the gradual aggregation of randomly diffusing adatoms. Experiments in Pb/Si(111) at low temperature have discovered a dramatically different type of nucleation, with perfect crystalline islands emerging "explosively" out of the compressed wetting layer after a critical coverage Θ_{c}=1.22 ML is reached. The unexpectedly high island growth rates, the directional correlations in the growth of neighboring islands and the persistence in time of where mass is added in individual islands, suggest that nucleation is a result of the highly coherent motion of the wetting layer, over mesoscopic distances.

Growth of fcc(111) Dy multi-height islands on 6H-SiC(0001) graphene.

Graphene based spintronic devices require an understanding of the growth of magnetic metals. Rare earth metals have large bulk magnetic moments so they are good candidates for such applications, and it is important to identify their growth mode. Dysprosium was deposited on epitaxial graphene, prepared by thermally annealing 6H-SiC(0001). The majority of the grown islands have triangular instead of hexagonal shapes. This is observed both for single layer islands nucleating at the top of incomplete islands and for fully completed multi-height islands. We analyze the island shape distribution and stacking sequence of successively grown islands to deduce that the Dy islands have fcc(111) structure, and that the triangular shapes result from asymmetric barriers to corner crossing.

High island densities and long range repulsive interactions: Fe on epitaxial graphene.

The understanding of metal nucleation on graphene is essential for promising future applications, especially of magnetic metals which can be used in spintronics or computer storage media. A common method to study the grown morphology is to measure the nucleated island density n as a function of growth parameters. Surprisingly, the growth of Fe on graphene is found to be unusual because it does not follow classical nucleation: n is unexpectedtly high, it increases continuously with the deposited amount θ and shows no temperature dependence. These unusual results indicate the presence of long range repulsive interactions. Kinetic Monte Carlo simulations and density functional theory calculations support this conclusion. In addition to answering an outstanding question in epitaxial growth, i.e., to find systems where long range interactions are present, the high density of magnetic islands, tunable with θ, is of interest for nanomagnetism applications.

Femtosecond population inversion and stimulated emission of dense Dirac fermions in graphene.

We show that strongly photoexcited graphene monolayers with 35 fs pulses quasi-instantaneously build up a broadband, inverted Dirac fermion population. Optical gain emerges and directly manifests itself via a negative conductivity at the near-infrared region for the first 200 fs, where stimulated emission completely compensates absorption loss in the graphene layer. Our experiment-theory comparison with two distinct electron and hole chemical potentials reproduce absorption saturation and gain at 40 fs, revealing, particularly, the evolution of the transient state from a hot classical gas to a dense quantum fluid with increasing the photoexcitation.

Metals on graphene: correlation between adatom adsorption behavior and growth morphology.

We present a systematic study of metal adatom adsorption on graphene by ab initio calculations. The calculations cover alkali metals, sp-simple metals, 3d and group 10 transition metals, noble metals, as well as rare earth metals. The correlation between the adatom adsorption properties and the growth morphology of the metals on graphene is also investigated. We show that the growth morphology is related to the ratio of the metal adsorption energy to its bulk cohesive energy (E(a)/E(c)) and the diffusion barrier (ΔE) of the metal adatom on graphene. Charge transfer, electric dipole and magnetic moments, and graphene lattice distortion induced by metal adsorption would also affect the growth morphologies of the metal islands. We also show that most of the metal nanostructures on graphene would be thermally stable against coarsening.

Lead growth on Si(111) surfaces reconstructed by indium.

We study the Pb growth on both √3 × âˆš3-In and 4 × 1-In reconstructed Si(111) surfaces at room and low temperature (160 K). The study takes place with complementary techniques, to investigate the role of the substrate reconstruction and temperature in determining the growth mode of Pb. Specifically, we focus on the correlation between the growth morphology and the electronic structure of the Pb films. The information is obtained by using Auger electron spectroscopy, low energy electron diffraction, soft x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, scanning tunneling microscopy and spot profile analysis-low energy electron diffraction. The results show that, at low temperature and coverage ≤12 ML on the Si(111)√3 × âˆš3-In surface, Pb does not alter the initial semiconducting character of the substrate and three-dimensional Pb islands with poor crystallinity are grown on a wetting layer. On the other hand, for the same coverage range, Pb growth on the Si(111)4 × 1-In surface results in metallic Pb(111) crystalline islands after the completion of a double incomplete wetting layer. In addition, the bond arrangement of the adatoms is studied, confirming that In adatoms interact more strongly with the silicon substrate than the Pb ones. This promotes a stronger Pb-Pb interaction and enhances metallization. The onset of the metallization is correlated with the amount of pre-deposited In on the Si(111) surface. The decoupling of the Pb film from the 4 × 1-In interface can also explain the unusual thermal stability of the uniform height islands observed on this interface. The formation of these Pb islands is driven by quantum size effects. Finally, the different results of Pb growth on the two reconstructed surfaces confirm the importance of the interface, and also that the growth morphology, as well as the electronic structure of the Pb film can be tuned with the initial substrate reconstruction.

Coadsorption of lithium and oxygen on W(1 1 2): nanosized facets versus single crystals.

Coadsorption of lithium and oxygen on a nanosized W-tip is studied using field ion appearance energy spectroscopy (FIAES). Binding energies of coadsorbed Li-adatoms are derived locally for chosen atomic sites on (1 1 2) facets for different oxygen and Li-coverages. Independently, the binding energies of Li-adatoms in coadsorbed Li/oxygen layers are determined for macroscopic W(1 1 2) single crystal samples from the adsorption isobars in adsorption-desorption equilibrium experiments and compared with the local nm-scale measurements. The comparison reveals a very good agreement of results obtained by two different methods on differing length scales.

Strong metal adatom-substrate interaction of Gd and Fe with graphene.

Graphene is a unique 2D system of confined electrons with an unusual electronic structure of two inverted Dirac cones touching at a single point, with high electron mobility and promising microelectronics applications. The clean system has been studied extensively, but metal adsorption studies in controlled experiments have been limited; such experiments are important to grow uniform metallic films, metal contacts, carrier doping, etc. Two non-free-electron-like metals (rare earth Gd and transition metal Fe) were grown epitaxially on graphene as a function of temperature T and coverage θ. By measuring the nucleated island density and its variation with growth conditions, information about the metal-graphene interaction (terrace diffusion, detachment energy) is extracted. The nucleated island densities at room temperature (RT) are stable and do not coarsen, at least up to 400 °C, which shows an unusually strong metal-graphene bond; most likely it is a result of C atom rebonding from the pure graphene sp(2) C-C configuration to one of lower energy.

Surface diffusion experiments with STM: equilibrium correlations and non-equilibrium low temperature growth.

Measurements of surface diffusion depend on the state of the system whether the state is equilibrium versus non-equilibrium. Equilibrium experiments carried out in 2-d overlayers measure the collective diffusion coefficient D(c) and can test theoretical predictions in two-dimensional statistical mechanics. Growth experiments typically carried out at low temperatures and/or high flux rates probe systems under non-equilibrium conditions where novel diffusion mechanisms can potentially exist. The use of STM to study both types of measurements is discussed. D(c) can be measured from the autocorrelation of time-dependent tunneling current fluctuations generated by atom motion in and out of the tunneling area. Controlled experiments as function of temperature, coverage and tip-surface separation confirm that the signal is diffusive. For growth experiments the unusually uniform height island (for Pb/Si(111) In/Si(111)) has revealed a novel and intriguing type of diffusion at low temperatures that accounts for the high degree of the self organization. By monitoring the evolution of the stable islands out of a mixture of stable and unstable islands the unusual role of the wetting layer surrounding the growing islands is revealed.