Atomic White-Out: Enabling Atomic Circuitry Through Mechanically Induced Bonding of Single Hydrogen Atoms to a Silicon Surface

Abstract

We report the mechanically induced formation of a silicon-hydrogen covalent bond and its application in engineering nanoelectronic devices. We show that using the tip of a non-contact atomic force microscope (NC-AFM), a single hydrogen atom could be vertically manipulated. When applying a localized electronic excitation, a single hydrogen atom is desorbed from the hydrogen passivated surface and can be transferred to the tip apex as evidenced from a unique signature in frequency shift curves. In the absence of tunnel electrons and electric field in the scanning probe microscope junction at 0 V, the hydrogen atom at the tip apex is brought very close to a silicon dangling bond, inducing the mechanical formation of a silicon-hydrogen covalent bond and the passivation of the dangling bond. The functionalized tip was used to characterize silicon dangling bonds on the hydrogen-silicon surface, was shown to enhance the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) contrast, and allowed NC-AFM imaging with atomic and chemical bond contrasts. Through examples, we show the importance of this atomic scale mechanical manipulation technique in the engineering of the emerging technology of on-surface dangling bond based nanoelectronic devices.

9 pages (including references and Supplementary Section), 8 figures (5 in the main text, 3 in Supplementary)

References in corpus (6)

• Dangling-bond charge qubit on a silicon surface
• A phantom force induced by the tunneling current, characterized on Si(111)
• Single Electron Dynamics of an Atomic Silicon Quantum Dot on the H-Si(100) 2x1 Surface
• Scanning tunneling spectroscopy reveals a silicon dangling bond charge state transition
• New fabrication technique for highly sensitive qPlus sensor with well-defined spring constant
• Passivation of dangling bonds on hydrogenated Si(100)-2$\times$1: a possible method for error correction in hydrogen lithography

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Binary Atomic Silicon Logic
• SiQAD: A Design and Simulation Tool for Atomic Silicon Quantum Dot Circuits
• Atomic-scale manipulation and in situ characterization with scanning tunneling microscopy
• Initiating and monitoring the evolution of single electrons within atom-defined structures
• Electrostatic Landscape of a H-Silicon Surface Probed by a Moveable Quantum Dot
• Engineered electronic states in atomically precise artificial lattices and graphene nanoribbons
• Deep Learning-Guided Surface Characterization for Autonomous Hydrogen Lithography
• Atomic defects of the hydrogen-terminated Silicon(100)-2x1 surface imaged with STM and nc-AFM
• Detecting and Directing Single Molecule Binding Events on H-Si(100) with Application to Ultra-dense Data Storage
• Roadmap on Atomic-scale Semiconductor Devices
• Resolving and Tuning Carrier Capture Rates at a Single Silicon Atom Gap State
• Ionic Charge Distributions in Silicon Atomic Wires
• Hydrogen inserted into the Si(100)-2x1-H surface: A first-principles study
• Electronic Structures of Atomic Silicon Dimer Wires as a Function of Length
• Structural Control of Atomic Silicon Wires
• Multiple Silicon Dangling-Bond Charge qubits for quantum computing: A Hilbert-Space Analysis of the Hamiltonian