Periodic Trends in Adsorption and Activation Energies for Heterometallic Diffusion on (100) Transition Metal Surfaces

Abstract

A first-principles analysis of trends in metal-on-metal hopping diffusion for 64 admetal/substrate systems is presented. Focusing on the (100) facets of various transition metal substrates, we demonstrate that the calculated hopping diffusion barriers may be interpreted in terms of the cohesive energies of the admetals and substrates, as well as the lattice constants of the substrates. We further show that general linear relationships exist between the diffusion barriers and the corresponding adsorption energies on each transition metal substrate. The slopes in these Brønsted–Evans–Polanyi relationships are related to the degree of resemblance between the initial states and the transition states for hopping diffusion, and the slopes are found to depend sensitively on the nature of the transition metal substrate. Substrates with higher cohesive energies and smaller lattice constants generally exhibit smaller slopes and, therefore, a closer correspondence between the transition states and the initial states. These relationships, in addition to providing fundamental insights into trends in diffusion across different transition metal surfaces, give a powerful and convenient means of predicting diffusional kinetics from purely thermodynamic quantities. The results may ultimately provide a useful input to kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC)-type simulations, enabling efficient and accurate studies of heteroepitaxial metal-on-metal growth.