Abstract
The stepped Si(553)-Au surface undergoes a $1\times3$ reconstruction at low temperature which has recently been interpreted theoretically as the $\times3$ ordering of spin-polarized silicon atoms along a step edge in each surface unit cell. This predicted magnetic ground state has a clear spectroscopic signature---a silicon step-edge state at $0.5$ eV above the Fermi level---that arises from strong exchange splitting and hence would not occur without spin polarization. Here we report
spatially resolved scanning tunneling spectroscopy data for Si(553)-Au that reveal key differences in the unoccupied step-edge density of states between room temperature and $40$ K. At low temperature we find an unoccupied state at 0.55 eV above every third step-edge silicon atom, in excellent agreement with the spin-polarized ground state predicted theoretically.