Eur. Phys. J. B 43, 65-71 (2005)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2005-00028-4

Bulk mediated surface diffusion: non Markovian desorption with finite first moment

¹ Facultad de Matemáticas, Astronomía y Física, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba 5000 Córdoba, Argentina
² Instituto de Física de Cantabria, 39005 Santander, Spain and Grupo de Física Estadística, Centro Atómico Bariloche and Instituto Balseiro, 8400 San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina

Corresponding author: ^a wio@ifca.unican.es

Received: 25 June 2004
Revised: 4 October 2004
Published online: 11 February 2005

Abstract

Here we address a fundamental issue in surface physics: the dynamics of adsorbed molecules. We study this problem when the particle's desorption is characterized by a non Markovian process, while the particle's adsorption and its motion in the bulk are governed by a Markovian dynamics. We study the diffusion of particles in a semi-infinite cubic lattice, and focus on the effective diffusion process at the interface z = 1. We calculate analytically the conditional probability to find the particle on the z=1 plane as well as the surface dispersion as functions of time. The comparison of these results with Monte Carlo simulations show an excellent agreement.