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4.5
I once had a conversation with Gert Ehrlich regarding the genesis of his research work. He joked that his career began with research on the tungsten filaments that supported the development of electronic vacuum tube technology at General Electric's flagship research lab in Schenectady NY. He went on to observe that this research program collapsed into apocalyptic obsolescence with the advent of semiconductor electronics. This tragic turn of events forced all those whose careers were supported by tungsten-based technology to find another line of work--and thus surface science was born--especially surface science of refractory metal surfaces! As so Ehrlich and his colleagues streamed out of the sinking ship of Tungsten-bound electronics, manned with the modern techniques of ultra-high vacuum (UHV) learned at the feet of GE luminary Irving Langmuir! For Ehrlich, his sanctuary was that of the isolated prairie enclave of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana--where he assumed the position of full professor in 1968. And so, 40-odd years later, we see what Gert Ehrlich and his colleague Grazyna Antczak have wrought!Although the field ion microscope (FIM) images of atomic configurations are seductively beautiful, the UHV environment necessary for such experiments is a harsh mistress! Think of the generations of graduate students and post-docs laboring to bake and outgas their UHV FIM systems (a process taking about a week) only to burn out the filament on the first attempt at depositing adatoms on the FIM sample! Think of the thousands upon thousands of FIM images recorded--and each one just to determine the position of a single diffusing adatom. Think of all of the patient waiting while the adatom diffuses a few atomic steps while the tip is annealed! It is intimidating to contemplate the degree of tedious observation, equipment repair, and troubleshooting required for these experiments!Nevertheless, and in spite of the tragedy of wasted youth laboring in Midwestern oblivion, this book is wonderfully beguiling! The pioneering FIM surface diffusion measurements of Ehrlich and Hudda for the W(211) plane in 1966 were refined over the course of later investigations (p.211-212, ref.82), first by Graham and Ehrlich in 1975 (ref.84) and later by Flahive and Graham in 1980 (ref.85)--with the latter revealing a slight dependence of the activation energy on the width of the plane. Senft and Ehrlich (pp.124-127, refs.169-171) were even able to show that diffusing adatoms were able to execute acrobatic jumps that actually soared over adjacent surface bonding sites! John Wrigley (p.29, refs.28,29; p.90, ref.47) even used Rob Chamber's specially-designed atom probe (p.28, ref.27) to discover that diffusing adatoms could exchange with those (of different elemental composition) constituting the surface.The technique of scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) invented by Nobel laureates Rohr and Binnig in the the early 1980's were later joined with the FIM techniques developed by Erwin Muller in the mid 1950's to complete this magnum opus. The authors review of atomic imaging techniques is very comprehensive--they even see fit to observe that an early version of STM was developed by Russ Young in 1972 (pp.31,60, ref.45), a fact that seems generally known to only Young's contemporary fellow scientists at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) in Gaithersburg MD.One final and ironic observation is that even the semiconductor world eventually looked to the work of Ehrlich and Schwoebel on metallic diffusion near a surface step in order to better understand the growth of electronic device layers. I feel certain that this book, and the hundred and hundreds of works sited at the end each chapter, will be aggressively mined for the rest of this century and beyond!
