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Si(110) surface is currently attracting renewed interests because of its unique properties such as enhanced hole mobility [1], high surface reactivity [2], and strong morphological anisotropy [3]. However, despite of the increasing requirements, many basic properties including surface atomic structure have not been fully resolved yet, unlike other low-index Si surfaces. The delay of the studies on the Si(110) surface is partly due to the difficulty in the surface preparation. The clean Si(110) surface has a complicated missing-row type reconstruction with huge unit cell, namely 16x2 reconstruction. So far, commonly reported 16x2 surface has been multi-domain structure, containing certain amounts of disorder [4]. For further development of the understanding of Si(110), it is quite important to establish the preparation method for well-defined, single-domain surface of Si(110).
In this contribution, we show a simple surface preparation method for the single-domain of Si(110)-16x2 utilizing the electromigration. It is found that the DC electric current along the reconstruction rows straighten and elongates the reconstruction row. By means of the controlled electromigration, a micrometer-wide, single-domain 16x2 surface can be successfully fabricated with almost perfect reproducibility.
The fabricated single-domain of Si(110)-16x2 is not only useful for the basic research on this surface, but also has high potential for application due to its strong one-dimensionality. Since the 16x2 reconstruction is a pile of straight monoatomic steps, it could be utilized as a new template for 1-D nanostructure, such as atomic/molecular wires.
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