Some recent advances are as follows.
The details will appear soon. Our STM images taken at elevating annealing temperatures shows several atomic processes involved in the formation and deconstruction of this surface alloy. The statistical analysis of the total area and size distribution of the islands as a function of the annealing temperature clues us to the atomistic mechanism of the surface alloy formation. The details will be published shortly in Surface Science . We have compiled a large number of STM images to deduce the size distribution.