1201.5514 (Itziar Goikoetxea et al.)

Non-adiabatic effects during the dissociative adsorption of O2 at
Ag(111)? A first-principles divide and conquer study    [PDF]

Itziar Goikoetxea, Juan Beltrán, Jörg Meyer, J. Iñaki Juaristi, Maite Alducin, Karsten Reuter

We study the gas-surface dynamics of O2 at Ag(111) with the particular
objective to unravel whether electronic non-adiabatic effects are contributing
to the experimentally established inertness of the surface with respect to
oxygen uptake. We employ a first-principles divide and conquer approach based
on an extensive density-functional theory mapping of the adiabatic potential
energy surface (PES) along the six O2 molecular degrees of freedom. Neural
networks are subsequently used to interpolate this grid data to a continuous
representation. The low computational cost with which forces are available from
this PES representation allows then for a sufficiently large number of
molecular dynamics trajectories to quantitatively determine the very low
initial dissociative sticking coefficient at this surface. Already these
adiabatic calculations yield dissociation probabilities close to the scattered
experimental data. Our analysis shows that this low reactivity is governed by
large energy barriers in excess of 1.1 eV very close to the surface.
Unfortunately, these adiabatic PES characteristics render the dissociative
sticking a rather insensitive quantity with respect to a potential spin or
charge non-adiabaticity in the O2-Ag(111) interaction. We correspondingly
attribute the remaining deviations between the computed and measured
dissociation probabilities primarily to unresolved experimental issues with
respect to surface imperfections.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.5514