Observations of sudden structural-changes of the faulted-halves of the DAS structure on quenched Si(1 1 1) by STM

We have carried out scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) observations of unreconstructed regions on quenched Si(1 1 1) surfaces at 380°C at a scanning speed of 1.7 s per frame. In the regions, it is found that single faulted-halves of the dimer-adatom-stacking-fault (DAS) structure are formed isolatedly or at the edges of the surrounding DAS domains sharing one corner hole. In such “living” regions, we have succeeded to observe sudden structural changes of the faulted-halves during line scans in single frames of STM images.