0000000000234170

AUTHOR

See-chen Ying

Adatom dynamics and diffusion in a model of O/W(110)

We consider adatom dynamics and diffusion in a lattice-gas model of the O/W(110) system under conditions where the adatom interaction effects are important. In particular, we study the behavior of the tracer and collective diffusion coefficients as a function of temperature when crossing over from the high-temperature disordered phase to a low-temperature symmetry broken phase. To this end, we utilize a combined analytical and numerical approach based on the recently developed dynamical mean field theory (DMF) in addition to conventional Monte Carlo simulations. In the case studied here, the origin of the strong temperature dependence of the effective activation barrier ${E}_{A}^{D}$ close …

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Non-Arrhenius Behavior of Surface Diffusion Near a Phase Transition Boundary

We study the non-Arrhenius behavior of surface diffusion near the second-order phase transition boundary of an adsorbate layer. In contrast to expectations based on macroscopic thermodynamic effects, we show that this behavior can be related to the average microscopic jump rate which in turn is determined by the waiting-time distribution W(t) of single-particle jumps at short times. At long times, W(t) yields a barrier that corresponds to the rate-limiting step in diffusion. The microscopic information in W(t) should be accessible by STM measurements.

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Memory effects and coverage dependence of surface diffusion in a model adsorption system

We study the coverage dependence of surface diffusion coefficients for a strongly interacting adsorption system O/W(110) via Monte Carlo simulations of a lattice-gas model. In particular, we consider the nature and emergence of memory effects as contained in the corresponding correlation factors in tracer and collective diffusion. We show that memory effects can be very pronounced deep inside the ordered phases and in regions close to first and second order phase transition boundaries. Particular attention is paid to the details of the time dependence of memory effects. The memory effect in tracer diffusion is found to decay following a power law after an initial transient period. This beha…

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Memory expansion for diffusion coefficients

We present a memory expansion for macroscopic transport coefficients such as the collective and tracer diffusion coefficients ${D}_{C}$ and ${D}_{T},$ respectively. The successive terms in this expansion for ${D}_{C}$ describe rapidly decaying memory effects of the center-of-mass motion, leading to fast convergence when evaluated numerically. For ${D}_{T},$ one obtains an expansion of similar form that contains terms describing memory effects in single-particle motion. As an example we evaluate ${D}_{C}$ and ${D}_{T}$ for three strongly interacting surface systems through Monte Carlo simulations, and for a simple model diffusion system via molecular dynamics calculations. We show that the n…

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A dynamical mean field theory for the study of surface diffusion constants

We present a combined analytical and numerical approach based on the Mori projection operator formalism and Monte Carlo simulations to study surface diffusion within the lattice-gas model. In the present theory, the average jump rate and the susceptibility factor appearing are evaluated through Monte Carlo simulations, while the memory functions are approximated by the known results for a Langmuir gas model. This leads to a dynamical mean field theory (DMF) for collective diffusion, while approximate correlation effects beyond DMF are included for tracer diffusion. We apply our formalism to three very different strongly interacting systems and compare the results of the new approach with th…

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