Interaction of highly vibrationally excited molecules with clean metal surfaces. Final technical report

摘要

The authors present results from a grant funded under the Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences. A collaboration between Prof. Alec Wodtke of the Department of Chemistry at UCSB and Daniel J. Auerbach of IBM Almaden Research Labs has allowed new experiments on the dynamics of surface chemical reactivity to be successfully executed. High quality data has been generated which provides an excellent test of theoretical models of surface reactivity, a topic of importance to catalysis. The authors have obtained the first experimental measurements on the influence of reactant velocity on the steric effect in a chemical reaction: the dissociative adsorption of hydrogen on copper. They have also designed and built a molecular beam scattering apparatus for the study of highly vibrationally excited molecules and their interactions with clean and oxidized metal surfaces. With this apparatus they have observed the vibrational energy exchange of highly vibrationally excited NO with an oxidized copper surface. Multi-quantum vibrational relaxation was found ({Delta}v = 1-5). Such remarkably strong and efficient vibrational energy transfer represents a qualitatively new phenomenon and is representative of the exciting new behavior that they had hoped might be observable in this project. Evidence of chemical reactivity of vibrationally excited NO on a clean copper surface was also found.