Metal Surfaces

Metal-metal bonds in bimetallic surfaces.

Magnetoelectric coupling at metal surfaces.

Magnetoelectric coupling allows the magnetic state of a material to be changed by an applied electric field. To date, this phenomenon has mainly been observed in insulating materials such as complex multiferroic oxides. Bulk metallic systems do not exhibit magnetoelectric coupling, because applied electric fields are screened by conduction electrons. We demonstrate strong magnetoelectric coupli...

Molecular architectonic on metal surfaces.

The engineering of highly organized systems from instructed molecular building blocks opens up new vistas for the control of matter and the exploration of nanodevice concepts. Recent investigations demonstrate that well-defined surfaces provide versatile platforms for steering and monitoring the assembly of molecular nanoarchitectures in exquisite detail. This review delineates the principles o...

Metal-Insulator Transitions at Surfaces

Various types of metal-insulator transitions are discussed to find conditions for which an ideal surface of a bulk insulator is metallic. It is argued that for the correlation-driven Mott metal-insulator transition the surface phase diagram should be expected to have the same topology as the phase diagram for magnetic order at surfaces: The corresponding linearized mean-field descriptions, a si...

Visual inspection of metal surfaces

The majoTity of applications of automatic visual inspection have been the case in which a high contrast image can be obtained. This will result from object silhouettes 1 and high contrast reflectivity changes as in printed text. In these cases, the image can usually be successfully segmented by a threshold operation2,3 leading to a two-level or binary image. The cases that lead to difficulty at...