UHV Surface Preparation Methods

The preparation of clean surfaces is one of the most important challenges in surface science research. The subject has become even more important with the advent of scanning probe techniques in the 1980s, which allow for the characterization of solid surfaces with atomic precision. The methods for surface preparation that are employed in ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) are nowadays well established and range from simple heat treatment (annealing) to consecutive cycles of, for example, ion bombardment followed by annealing, chemical treatment, and thin film deposition. A short introduction to the most important techniques, which are currently used for surface preparation in UHV, is given along with a few illustrating case studies. We will mainly refer to metal surfaces as models keeping in mind that the procedures applied for metals are in general also applicable for semiconductor surfaces.