Finding Needles in Haystacks: Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Reveals the Complex Reactivity of Si(100) Surfaces

Many chemical reactions—etching, growth, and catalytic—produce highly faceted surfaces. Examples range from the atomically flat silicon surfaces produced by anisotropic etchants to the wide variety of faceted nanoparticles, including cubes, wires, plates, tetrapods, and more. This faceting is a macroscopic manifestation of highly site-specific surface reactions. In this Account, we show that these site-specific reactions literally write a record of their chemical reactivity in the morphology of the surface—a record that can be quantified with scanning tunneling microscopy.

Website: http://www.arjonline.org/physical-sciences/american-research-journal-of-chemistry/