Atomic White-Out: Enabling Atomic Circuitry through Mechanically Induced Bonding of Single Hydrogen Atoms to a Silicon Surface.

We report the mechanically induced formation of a silicon-hydrogen covalent bond and its application in engineering nanoelectronic devices. We show that using the tip of a noncontact atomic force microscope (NC-AFM), a single hydrogen atom could be vertically manipulated. When applying a localized electronic excitation, a single hydrogen atom is desorbed from the hydrogen-passivated surface and can be transferred to the tip apex, as evidenced from a unique signature in frequency shift curves.

Indications of field-directing and self-templating effects on the formation of organic lines on silicon.

It has previously been shown that multimolecular organic nanostructures form on H-Si(100)-2×1 via a radical mediated growth process. In this mechanism, growth begins through the addition of a molecule to a silicon surface dangling bond, followed by the abstraction of a neighboring H atom and generation of a new dangling bond on the neighboring site. Nanostructures formed by this mechanism grow along one edge of a dimer row.