Strain engineering tunable nanotemplates on the Cu(110)–(2 × 1)–O surface

We present an STM study on the domain pattern formation of the Cu(110)–O surface. We found that the separation of the oxygen adsorbate phase into the domain pattern is consistent with a phenomenological model of size-dependent elastic relaxation of the strained surface. We developed a thermally assisted oxygen adsorption procedure aiming to control the size of the two-dimensional (2 × 1)–O islands nucleated at the surface under oxygen adsorption serving as precursors for domain pattern formation. We engineered wide range tuneable (2 × 1)–O domain patterns by controlling the nuclei size and the oxygen coverage at the pattern formation stage.