Crystalline and quasicrystalline allotropes of Pb formed on the fivefold surface of icosahedral Ag-In-Yb

H R Sharma; J A Smerdon; P J Nugent; A Ribeiro; I McLeod; V R Dhanak; M Shimoda; A P Tsai; R McGrath

doi:10.1063/1.4873596

Crystalline and quasicrystalline allotropes of Pb formed on the fivefold surface of icosahedral Ag-In-Yb

J Chem Phys. 2014 May 7;140(17):174710. doi: 10.1063/1.4873596.

Authors

H R Sharma¹, J A Smerdon¹, P J Nugent¹, A Ribeiro¹, I McLeod², V R Dhanak², M Shimoda³, A P Tsai³, R McGrath¹

Affiliations

¹ Surface Science Research Centre and Department of Physics, The University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, United Kingdom.
² Department of Physics and the Stephenson Institute for Renewable Energy, The University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, United Kingdom.
³ National Institute for Materials Science, 1-2-1 Sengen, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0047, Japan.

PMID: 24811658
DOI: 10.1063/1.4873596

Abstract

Crystalline and quasicrystalline allotropes of Pb are formed by evaporation on the fivefold surface of the icosahedral (i) Ag-In-Yb quasicrystal under ultra-high vacuum. Lead grows in three dimensional quasicrystalline order and subsequently forms fivefold-twinned islands with the fcc(111) surface orientation atop of the quasicrystalline Pb. The islands exhibit specific heights (magic heights), possibly due to the confinement of electrons in the islands. We also study the adsorption behavior of C60 on the two allotropes of Pb. Scanning tunneling microcopy reveals that a high corrugation of the quasicrystalline Pb limits the diffusion of the C60 molecules and thus produces a disordered film, similar to adsorption behavior of the same molecules on the clean substrate surface. However, the sticking coefficient of C60 molecules atop the Pb islands approaches zero, regardless of the overall C60 coverage.