Structural Control of Atomic Silicon Wires

Bare Si(100)-2 × 1 surface atoms exhibit a buckled structure where one Si atom in a dimer is lowered while the other is raised, leading to two possible buckling configurations equivalent in energy. The relatively low energy barrier between these configurations allows dimers to flip rapidly and uncontrollably unless stabilized by surface defects or observed at low temperatures due to reduced thermal energy using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). This rapid flipping results in a time-averaged symmetric appearance under STM. In this study, we investigated variable-length buckled dimer wires on the hydrogenated Si(100) surface composed of silicon dangling bonds. We demonstrate that on the degenerate p-type silicon at 4.5 K, the rapid switching of these dimers can be frozen at low scanning biases. Such buckled wires can, however, be controllably flipped using a bias pulse. A line as long as 37 dimers was repeatedly uniformly flipped by a single pulse delivered near one terminus of the wire. The tip-directed flipping of a particular wire does not switch adjacent wires, suggesting that binary wires can make well-isolated rewritable binary memory elements. Furthermore, at sufficiently high biases, switching generates telegraph noise that could be of utility for random number generation. The integration and encapsulation of these wires with previously described silicon dangling bond-made logic gates and binary wires might allow for self-contained actuation and readout without requiring any role of an STM tip.