Strong Electron Confinement By Stacking-fault Induced Fractional Steps on Ag(111) Surfaces

Abstract

The electron reflection amplitude $R$ at stacking-fault (SF) induced fractional steps is determined for Ag(111) surface states using a low temperature scanning tunneling microscope. Unexpectedly, $R$ remains as high as $0.6\sim 0.8$ as energy increases from 0 to 0.5 eV, which is in clear contrast to its rapidly decreasing behavior for monatomic (MA) steps [L. B{ü}rgi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{81}, 5370 (1998)]. Tight-binding calculations based on {\em ab-initio} derived band structures confirm the experimental finding. Furthermore, the phase shifts at descending SF steps are found to be systematically larger than counterparts for ascending steps by $\approx 0.4\pi$. These results indicate that the subsurface SF plane significantly contributes to the reflection of surface states.

References in corpus (3)

• Role of bulk and surface phonons in the decay of metal surface states
• Scanning tunnelling spectroscopy of electron resonators
• Theoretical analysis of STM-derived lifetimes of excitations in the Shockley surface state band of Ag(111)

Cited by in corpus (1)

• One-dimensional surface states on a striped Ag thin film with stacking fault arrays