We present a combined experimental and theoretical study of NO(v = 3 → 3, 2, 1) scattering from a Au(111) surface at incidence translational energies ranging from 0.1 to 1.2 eV. Experimentally, molecular beam-surface scattering is combined with vibrational overtone pumping and quantumstate selective detection of the recoiling molecules. Theoretically, we employ a recently developed first-principles approach, which employs an Independent Electron Surface Hopping (IESH) algorithm to model the nonadiabatic dynamics on a Newns-Anderson Hamiltonian derived from density functional theory. This approach has been successful when compared to previously reported NO/Au scattering data. The experiments presented here show that vibrational relaxation probabilities increase with incidence energy of translation. The theoretical simulations incorrectly predict high relaxation probabilities at low incidence translational energy. We show that this behavior originates from trajectories exhibiting multiple bounces at the surface, associated with deeper penetration and favored (N-down) molecular orientation, resulting in a higher average number of electronic hops and thus stronger vibrational relaxation. The experimentally observed narrow angular distributions suggest that mainly single-bounce collisions are important. Restricting the simulations by selecting only single-bounce trajectories improves agreement with experiment. The multiple bounce artifacts discovered in this work are also present in simulations employing electronic friction and even for electronically adiabatic simulations, meaning they are not a direct result of the IESH algorithm. This work demonstrates how even subtle errors in the adiabatic interaction potential, especially those that influence the interaction time of the molecule with the surface, can lead to an incorrect description of electronically nonadiabatic vibrational energy transfer in molecule-surface collisions. © 2014 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx

We report high resolution state-to-state time-of-flight (TOF) measurements for scattering of HCl(v=2, J=1) from a Au(111) single crystal surface for both vibrationally elastic (v=2-->2) as well as inelastic (v=2-->1) channels at seven incidence energies between 0.28 and 1.27 eV. The dependences of the TOF results on final HCl rotational state and surface temperature are also reported. The translational energy transferred to the surface depends linearly on incidence energy and is close to the single surface-atom impulse (Baule) limit over the entire range of incidence energies studied. The probability of vibrational relaxation is also large. For molecules that relax from v=2 to v=1, the fraction of vibrational energy that is transferred to the surface is approximately 74%. We discuss these observations in terms of an impulse approximation as well as the possible role of translational and vibrational excitations of electron-hole pairs in the solid.

The most common mechanism of catalytic surface chemistry is that of Langmuir and Hinshelwood (LH). In the LH mechanism, reactants adsorb, become thermalized with the surface, and subsequently react. The measured vibrational (relaxation) lifetimes of molecules adsorbed at metal surfaces are in the range of a few picoseconds. As a consequence, vibrational promotion of LH chemistry is rarely observed, with the exception of LH reactions occurring via a molecular physisorbed intermediate. Here, we directly detect adsorption and subsequent desorption of vibrationally excited CO molecules from a Au(111) surface. Our results show that CO (v = 1) survives on a Au(111) surface for ~1 × 10 s. Such long vibrational lifetimes for adsorbates on metal surfaces are unexpected and pose an interesting challenge to the current understanding of vibrational energy dissipation on metal surfaces. They also suggest that vibrational promotion of surface chemistry might be more common than is generally believed.

We report zero-coverage reaction probabilities (S0) for HCl dissociative adsorption on Au(111) obtained by the seeded molecular beam hot-nozzle method. For measurements at normal incidence with mean translational energies ranging from 0.94 to 2.56 eV (nozzle temperatures 296 to 1060 K), S0 increased from 6 × 10(-6) to 2 × 10(-2). S0 also increased with increasing nozzle temperature for fixed incidence energy associated with the motion normal to the surface. Accounting for the influence of the vibrational state population and translational energy distributions in the incident beam, we are able to compare the experimental results to recent theoretical predictions. These calculations, performed employing 6-D quantum dynamics on an electronically adiabatic potential energy surface obtained using density functional theory at the level of the generalized gradient approximation and the static surface approximation, severely overestimate the reaction probabilities when compared with our experimental results. We discuss some possible reasons for this large disagreement.

Articles you may be interested inThe importance of accurate adiabatic interaction potentials for the correct description of electronically nonadiabatic vibrational energy transfer: A combined experimental and theoretical study of NO(v = 3) collisions with a Au (111) In this work we seek to examine the nature of collisional energy transfer between HCl and Au(111) for nonreactive scattering events that sample geometries near the transition state for dissociative adsorption by varying both the vibrational and translational energy of the incident HCl molecules in the range near the dissociation barrier. Specifically, we report absolute vibrational excitation probabilities for HCl(v = 0 → 1) and HCl(v = 1 → 2) scattering from clean Au(111) as a function of surface temperature and incidence translational energy. The HCl(v = 2 → 3) channel could not be observed-presumably due to the onset of dissociation. The excitation probabilities can be decomposed into adiabatic and nonadiabatic contributions. We find that both contributions strongly increase with incidence vibrational state by a factor of 24 and 9, respectively. This suggests that V-T as well as V-EHP coupling can be enhanced near the transition state for dissociative adsorption at a metal surface. We also show that previously reported HCl(v = 0 → 1) excitation probabilities [Q. Ran et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 237601 (2007)]-50 times smaller than those reported here-were influenced by erroneous assignment of spectroscopic lines used in the data analysis. Published by AIP Publishing. [http://dx