Adsorption of hydrogen on Pt(100) at low temperatures

Abstract

We have investigated the structure of the hydrogen-covered Pt(100) surface by high-resolution helium diffraction and compared it with the clean one. At surface temperatures below 250 K hydrogen adsorption leads to characteristic changes in the surface structure, as observed also by other authors [1–5]. While this structure was previously denoted as “(1 × 1)-like”, our He-diffraction patterns clearly show, that the reconstruction is not removed at temperatures below 250 K. The diffraction patterns of the hydrogen-covered surface are compared to those obtained for the reconstructed Pt(100)-hex surface and the unreconstructed clean Pt(100)(1 × 1) surface (hydrogen coverage < 1%) The corrugation functions for these three surfaces were obtained using the eikonal approximation. The modified surface corrugation of the “(1 × 1)-like ” structure is interpreted as a charge redistribution caused by the adsorbed hydrogen on the surface.