Philippe Marcus asked: If the defects are neutral, one would expect no effect of the electric eld on oxide growth. Is this what you suggest?Mira Todorova responded: This is a very interesting suggestion to experimentally verify the existence/presence of charge neutral defects. We have not considered this aspect in our paper but would like to call for corresponding experiments in the region of phase space where such defects are predicted to be thermodynamically stable.Hendrik Bluhm questioned: Have you considered the presence of a hydroxide phase at the interface between ZnO and water? How would the presence of the hydroxide phase inuence your model on the role of point defects in governing the growth/dissolution of the oxide formed on Zn?Mira Todorova answered: A hydroxide phase at the interface was not considered. We chose ZnO for two reasons: (i) because of the availability of a vast amount of relevant data found for ZnO in the semiconductor literature and (ii) because ZnO is mentioned in the experimental literature on corrosion, as being the rst compact oxide layer formed during corrosion on ZnO. 1 The methodology presented in our work can be equally well applied to a hydroxide phase. Unfortunately, to our knowledge the information about the point defects forming in a Zn-hydroxide, which is needed for our thermodynamic model, is not available in the literature yet. Once we have performed the necessary density-functional theory calculations for the point defects in the hydroxide phase, the presence of the hydroxide phase can be explicitly considered.

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