Oxygen
is an important reactant in several catalytic conversions
and partial oxidation reactions on Pd–Au alloy surfaces; however,
adsorption and dissociation are not fully understood, especially as
a function of the surface alloy composition. In this study, we probe
the influence of the atomic makeup of the surface of Pd–Au
catalysts regarding control of the catalytic activity toward O2 dissociation and the reactivity of the resulting oxygen adatoms.
To experimentally investigate this, we prepared various bimetallic
surfaces under ultrahigh vacuum via evaporation of Pd onto a Au(111)
surface. Hydrogen molecules were used to characterize the composition
of the Pd–Au surfaces, which we simplistically group into two
categories: (i) Pd–Au interface sites and (ii) Pd(111)-like
island sites. When the Pd coverage is 1.0 ML, which predominantly
indicates Pd–Au interface sites, no dissociative adsorption
of O2 at 300 K is observed, but dissociation begins to
be measurable on the surfaces with larger Pd loadings (greater than
1.5 ML), which we believe leads to Pd(111)-like islands on the surface.
We also find that adsorbed oxygen atoms are very reactive at the Pd–Au
interface sites via measurements of the CO oxidation reaction at relatively
low temperatures (<200 K); however, CO oxidation can also take
place at higher temperatures (∼400 K) and in this case is very
dependent on Pd coverage, being strongly related to the number of
Pd(111)-like islands, which bind Oa relatively strongly.
From our experimental results, we estimate the barrier to dissociation
of O2 and also the CO oxidation reaction barrier, which
is an indirect measure of the reactivity of the adsorbed atomic oxygen.
From our analysis, we find that, upon increasing Pd coverage, the
dissociation barrier for O2 steadily decreases and, further,
the reaction barrier for CO oxidation continuously increases. Finally,
oxygen molecularly adsorbs on the Pd–Au bimetallic surface
and is a precursor to dissociative O2 chemisorption, just
as with pure Pd surfaces, and additionally, the enhanced reactivity
of adsorbed atomic oxygen originates at the interfaces between Pd
and Au domains.