Hydrogen covered W(110) surface: A hydrogen liquid with a propensity for one-dimensional order

Hydrogen abstraction from metal surfaces: when electron-hole pair excitations strongly affect hot-atom recombination

Using molecular dynamics simulations, we predict that the inclusion of nonadiabatic electronic excitations influences the dynamics of preadsorbed hydrogen abstraction from the W(110) surface by hydrogen scattering. The hot-atom recombination, which involves hyperthermal diffusion of the impinging atom on the surface, is significantly affected by the dissipation of energy mediated by electron-hole pair excitations at low coverage and low incidence energy. This issue is of importance as this abstraction mechanism is thought to largely contribute to molecular hydrogen formation from metal surfaces.

Complex quasiparticle band structure induced by electron-phonon interaction: band splitting in the 1x1H/W110 surface

We show that the self-consistent solution of the complex Dyson equation for the electron-phonon (EP) problem introduces many body effects which are often observed in photoemission experiments. The formalism is applied to the H covered W(110) surface, using first-principles results for the electronic and vibrational structure. We demonstrate that the measured spin-polarized surface band splitting [Phys. Rev. Lett. 84, 2925 (2000)10.1103/PhysRevLett.84.2925; 89, 216802 (2002)] can be traced back to different quasiparticle (QP) states induced by EP coupling. Despite the breakdown of the single QP picture, the spectral functions are very well represented by the predicted multiple QP structure.