Two-bath model for activated surface diffusion of interacting adsorbates

Abstract

The diffusion and low vibrational motions of adsorbates on surfaces can be well described by a purely stochastic model, the so-called interacting single adsorbate model, for low-moderate coverages (theta < or approximately equal to 0.12). Within this model, the effects of thermal surface phonons and adsorbate-adsorbate collisions are accounted for by two uncorrelated noise functions, which arise in a natural way from a two-bath model based on a generalization of the one-bath Caldeira-Leggett Hamiltonian. As an illustration, the model is applied to the diffusion of Na atoms on a Cu(001) surface with different coverages.