Eur. Phys. J. B (2017) 90: 201
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2017-80235-0

Regular Article

Energy barriers of single-adatoms diffusion on unreconstructed and reconstructed (110) surfaces

¹ Laboratoire de Physique de la Matière Condensée, Faculté des Sciences Ben M’sik, Hassan II University of Casablanca, B.P. 7955, Casablanca, Morocco
² Université Hassan I, Faculté Polydisciplinaire de Khouribga, 26000 Settat, Morocco
³ Laboratoire de l’ingénierie des Matériaux et Biosciences, Ecole Normale supérieure, Université Hassan II Casablanca, Casablanca, Morocco
⁴ Université Chouaib Dokalli, El Jadida, Morocco

^a e-mail: matrane.imane@gmail.com

Received: 21 April 2017
Received in final form: 7 June 2017
Published online: 18 October 2017

Abstract

The present paper is aimed mainly to investigate theoretically the diffusion of Ag, Cu, Au and Pt adatoms on the (1 × 1) unreconstructed geometry for Ag, Cu and Pt (110), and reconstructed geometries ((1 × 2), (1 × 3) and (1 × 4)) for Pt and Au (110) surfaces. We consider the single adatom diffusion when additional atoms are deposited in adjacent row. For this study, we have used the molecular statics simulations combined with the embedded atom method. For several systems, we have calculated the activation barriers for hopping mechanism. For the diffusion on the unreconstructed surfaces, the trends for the activation barriers are the same for all considered systems except for Cu/Ag (110) system, where the activation barrier do not change. Further, our results indicate that additional atoms lead to a small decreasing of activation barriers for diffusion on reconstructed surfaces for some systems, while for other systems; the activation barrier remains practically unchanged.