Reconstruction of the Au (001) surface
The Au (100) surface has been a widely studied surface producing a variety of reconstructions using several different techniques. LEED has determined the clean surface reconstruction to consist of (5x20)1 and (26x68)2 surface domains. More recently an ultra high vacuum transmission electron microscope study of small Au(001) crystallites has found a reconstructed surface with (28x5)3 slightly rotated surface unit cells. The common elements in all these studies seem to be that the ‘5’ dimension is a hard dimension and does not seem to vary from study to study save one. It is also generally accepted that this surface can be thought of as the an hexagonal layer superimposed on a bulk terminated surface. Generally the long dimension is representative of an average number taken from the analysis of many domains. We have found the Au (001) surface to reconstruct into (5xn) domains where the ‘5’ dimension is a hard dimension while the ‘n’ is a soft dimension ranging between 15 and 21.