Thermal dissociation of chemisorbed oxygen molecules on Ag(110): an investigation by scanning tunnelling microscopy

The thermal dissociation of oxygen molecules on Ag(110) was studied by means of scanning tunnelling microscopy. At temperatures around 170 K a fraction of the molecules dissociate to form pairs of O atoms on the unreconstructed surface. The atoms lie in the trenches between the close-packed Ag rows; the intrapair distance is two lattice constants. The O atoms are very reactive with CO at temperatures as low as 70 K. The preferential orientation of the pairs in the [001] direction contrasts with the finding in a previous study (Hahn J R, Lee H J and Ho W 2000 Phys. Rev. Lett. Vol. 85 1914) that electron-induced dissociation exclusively leads to [110]-oriented pairs. The trajectories of thermal and electron-induced dissociations must therefore be different. In the temperature range of the dissociation, several additional oxygen features occur on the surface. These include unreacted O₂ molecules, the first nuclei of the added-row reconstruction, and two unidentified O-induced structures.