STM Image Contrast Interpretation and its Role in Determining the Structure of Transition Metal Oxide Surfaces

The surfaces of transition metal oxides play a critical role in many applications such as heterogeneous catalysis, gas detection, thermionic emission, electrolysis, and photolysis. Understanding the mechanisms of such surface processes requires a detailed knowledge of the surface microscopic structure. Since its invention in the early 1980's, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) has come to be a popular tool for oxide surface studies. However, despite some experimental successes, interpretation of the contrast in STM images of metal oxides has remained challenging due to the numerous contributing factors such as nonstoichiometry, structural complexity, surface disorder, and uncertainties regarding the bonding and termination layers in such multicomponent systems. In this thesis work, a computer simulation scheme that explores these effects separately has been developed to assist the interpretation of atomic-scale contrast in STM images. A semiquantitative technique, based on the one -dimensional square well tunneling model, is used to simulate constant current STM images. This model provides an efficient mechanism to test and explore effects of various ill-defined experimental parameters. The method was applied to the atomic-scale resolution STM study of three transition metal oxides: {rm M_{x}WO _3} (M=Rb, Na), {rm Mo_{18}O_{52}}, and V_2{rm O}_5. Our observations include surface termination layer variations, surface ordering, surface relaxations, surface steps caused by crystallographic shear (CS) planes, surface oxygen vacancies and other defects. In each case, the competition between geometric and electronic contributions to the image contrast is evident. Tunneling spectroscopy experiments and calculations were also performed on the sodium tungsten bronzes and the implication to their electronic structures is discussed.