Effects of surface motion and electron-hole pair excitations in CO₂ dissociation and scattering on Ni(100)

The energy transfer between different channels is an important aspect in chemical reactions at surfaces. We investigate here in detail the energy transfer dynamics in a prototypical system, i.e., reactive and nonreactive scattering of CO₂ on Ni(100), which is related to heterogeneous catalytic processes with Ni-based catalysts for CO₂ reduction. On the basis of our earlier nine-dimensional potential energy surface for CO₂/Ni(100), dynamical calculations have been done using the generalized Langevin oscillator (GLO) model combined with local density friction approximation (LDFA), in which the former accounts for the surface motion and the latter accounts for the low-energy electron-hole pair (EHP) excitation. In spite of its simplicity, it is found that the GLO model yields quite satisfactory results, including the significant energy loss and product energy disposal, trapping, and steering dynamics, all of which agree well with the ab initio molecular dynamics ones where many surface atoms are explicitly involved with high computational cost. However, the GLO model fails to describe the reactivity enhancement due to the lattice motion because it intrinsically does not incorporate the variance of barrier height on the surface atom displacement. On the other hand, in LDFA, the energy transferred to EHPs is found to play a minor role and barely alter the dynamics, except for slightly reducing the dissociation probabilities. In addition, vibrational state-selected dissociative sticking probabilities are calculated and previously observed strong mode specificity is confirmed. Our work suggests that further improvement of the GLO model is needed to consider the lattice-induced barrier lowering.