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Bridging the pressure gap in surface science at the atomic level: H/Cu(110)
L Osterlund1, P B Rasmussen, P Thostrup
1Institute of Physics and Astronomy and CAMP, University of Aarhus, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Physical Review Letters
|February 15, 2001
Abstract:
The structural response of the Cu(110) surface to H2 gas pressures ranging from 10(-13) to 1 bar is studied using a novel high-pressure scanning tunneling microscope (HP-STM). We find that at H2 pressures larger than 2 mbar the Cu(110) surface reconstructs into the ( 1x2) "missing-row" structure. From a quantitative analysis of the pressure dependence of the surface reconstruction, we conclude that Cu(110) responds identically to hydrogen at ultrahigh vacuum conditions and at atmospheric pressures. From the HP-STM data, we extract refined values for the adsorption and desorption rate constants.