Kristopher K. Barr

1 Introduction The recent development of wide bandgap semiconductors has been pivotal in facilitating the growing demand for efficient UV photodetectors across diverse applications such as flame detection, missile tracking systems, and biochemical sensing.[1, 2] Si-based devices have dominated the UV detector market for many years, despite the low Si bandgap of 1.1 eV[3] which is non-ideal for UV detector applications.

Scanning probe microscopies and spectroscopies enable investigation of surfaces and even buried interfaces down to the scale of chemical-bonding interactions, and this capability has been enhanced with the support of computational algorithms for data acquisition and image processing to explore physical, chemical, and biological phenomena. Here, we describe how scanning probe techniques have been enhanced by some of these recent algorithmic improvements.

Cyanide monolayers on Au{111} restructure from a hexagonal close-packed lattice to a mixed-orientation “ribbon” structure through thermal annealing. The new surface structure loses most of the observed surface features characterizing the initial as-adsorbed system with “ribbon” domain boundaries isolating rotationally offset surface regions where the orientation is guided by the underlying gold lattice.