Static surface temperature effects on the dissociation of H2 and D2 on Cu(111)

A model for taking into account surface temperature effects in molecule-surface reactions is reported and applied to the dissociation of H-2 and D-2 on Cu(111). In contrast to many models developed before, the model constructed here takes into account the effects of static corrugation of the potential energy surface rather than energy exchange between the impinging hydrogen molecule and the surface. Such an approximation is a vibrational sudden approximation. The quality of the model is assessed by comparison to a recent density functional theory study. It is shown that the model gives a reasonable agreement with recently performed ab initio molecular dynamics calculations, in which the surface atoms were allowed to move. The observed broadening of the reaction probability curve with increasing surface temperature is attributed to the displacement of surface atoms, whereas the effect of thermal expansion is found to be primarily a shift of the curve to lower energies. It is also found that the rotational quadrupole alignment parameter is generally lowered at low energies, whereas it remains approximately constant at high energies. Finally, it is shown that the approximation of an ideal static surface works well for low surface temperatures, in particular for the molecular beams for this system (T-s = 120 K). Nonetheless, for the state-resolved reaction probability at this surface temperature, some broadening is found. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4738956]