A lot of efforts have been devoted to understanding an interfacial structure. But, there are some difficulties about it as follows: An interfacial structure depends on a surface structure of a substrate and its temperature. Also, an interfacial structure is not homogeneous in general because of a lattice mismatch between a substrate and an overlayer thin film.
Ultrahigh vacuum transmission electron microscope (UHV-TEM) is very powerful to observe clean surface and the fabrication during deposition on the surface. Since structural information can be obtained from 10 nm-sized area to a few μm area using TEM, UHVTEM is very appropriate to investigate interfacial structure in detail.
In this study, structure of Ag/Si(111)--R30-Ag interface was observed by UHVTEM. Especially, it is interesting whether the superstructure is conserved at this interface or not. The Si(l11)- as the substrate surface was obtained by Ag 1ML deposition on Si(l11) 7×7 surface at 673 K.