2009 Volume 7 Pages 476-479
We report on a scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) study of Mg-O surfaces obtained from ultra-thin Mg/Ag(111) layers exposed to different doses of oxygen at room temperature. Large scale images of any of the Mg-O surfaces show faintly corrugated alignments of 2-2.5 nm wide elementary dots. For adequate O2 pressure with respect to the nominal Mg coverage, the dots are aligned along the < 112 > directions of silver. A hexagonal array of dots with a 4.5 nm periodicity may even be obtained, which we attribute to an epitaxial Mg-O (111) layer with in-plane spacing equal to 3.0 or 3.2 nm. [DOI: 10.1380/ejssnt.2009.476]