Ideal, Defective, and Gold--Promoted Rutile TiO2(110) Surfaces: Structures, Energies, Dynamics, and Thermodynamics from PBE+U

TL;DR

This study uses advanced first principles calculations with PBE+U to analyze gold-promoted TiO2(110) surfaces, revealing structural, electronic, and dynamic properties relevant for catalysis, especially the behavior of Au adatoms and surface stability.

Contribution

It introduces a validated PBE+U approach to investigate gold-promoted TiO2 surfaces, including structure, energetics, and dynamics, with detailed analysis of Au adatom behavior and thermodynamic stability.

Findings

Au adatoms migrate anisotropically on TiO2(110) surfaces.

Structures with substituted Au are thermodynamically stable under O-rich conditions.

PBE+U accurately captures surface interactions and charge redistribution.

Abstract

Extensive first principles calculations are carried out to investigate gold-promoted TiO2(110) surfaces in terms of structure optimizations, electronic structure analyses, ab initio thermodynamics calculations of surface phase diagrams, and ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. All computations rely on density functional theory in the generalized gradient approximation (PBE) and account for on-site Coulomb interactions via inclusion of a Hubbard correction, PBE+U, where U is computed from linear response theory. This approach is validated by investigating the interaction between TiO2(110) surfaces and typical probe species (H, H2O, CO). Relaxed structures and binding energies are compared to both data from the literature and plain PBE results. The main focus of the study is on the properties of gold-promoted titania surfaces and their interactions with CO. Both PBE+U and PBE optimized structures of Au adatoms adsorbed on stoichiometric and reduced TiO2 surfaces are computed, along with their electronic structure. The charge rearrangement induced by the adsorbates at the metal/oxide contact are also analyzed and discussed. By performing PBE+U ab initio molecular dynamics simulations, it is demonstrated that the diffusion of Au adatoms on the stoichiometric surface is highly anisotropic. The metal atoms migrate either along the top of the bridging oxygen rows, or around the area between these rows, from one bridging position to the next along the [001] direction. Approximate ab initio thermodynamics predicts that under O-rich conditions, structures obtained by substituting a Ti5c atom with an Au atom are thermodynamically stable over a wide range of temperatures and pressures.