corner
corner
APS » Journals » Phys. Rev. B » Volume 80 » Issue 7
< Previous Article | Next Article >

Phys. Rev. B 80, 073406 (2009) [4 pages]

Activated dissociation of O2 on Pb(111) surfaces by Pb adatoms

Download: PDF (236 kB) Buy this article Export: BibTeX or EndNote (RIS)

Yu Yang1,2, Jia Li2, Zhirong Liu3, Gang Zhou2, Jian Wu2, Wenhui Duan2,*, Peng Jiang4, Jin-Feng Jia2, Qi-Kun Xue2,4, Bing-Lin Gu2, and S. B. Zhang5
1LCP, Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, P.O. Box 8009, Beijing 100088, People’s Republic of China
2Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, People’s Republic of China
3College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, People’s Republic of China
4Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, People’s Republic of China
5Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180, USA

Received 16 July 2009; published 20 August 2009

We investigate the dissociation of O2 on Pb(111) surface using first-principles calculations. It is found that in a practical high-vacuum environment, the adsorption of molecular O2 takes place on clean Pb surfaces only at low temperatures such as 100 K, but the O2 easily desorbs at (elevated) room temperatures. It is further found that the Pb adatoms enhance the molecular adsorption and activate the adsorbed O2 to dissociate during subsequent room-temperature annealing. Our theory explains the observation of a two-step oxidation process on the Pb surfaces by the unique role of Pb adatoms.

© 2009 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.80.073406
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevB.80.073406
PACS:
68.43.Bc, 81.65.Mq, 82.30.−b

*Corresponding author; dwh@phys.tsinghua.edu.cn

 
< Previous Article | Next Article >