“…The oxidation of Ni is regarded as a typical surface reaction, and it has been extensively studied using several methods that include low energy electron diffraction (LEED) [17][18][19][20], Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) [17,18], photoemission spectroscopy (XPS and UPS) [21][22][23], metastable-atom electron spectroscopy (MAES) [24,25], high resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy (HREELS) [23,26,27], and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) [28,29], etc. According to the standard model proposed by Holloway and Hudson [17], the oxidation at 300 K proceeds in three steps: chemisorption, nucleation and lateral growth of oxide, and in-depth growth of oxide (see Section 4 for details).…”