Site-specific reactivity of ethylene at distorted dangling bond configurations on Si(001)

TL;DR

This study investigates how different surface defect configurations on Si(001) influence ethylene's reactivity, revealing that partially covered dimers significantly increase reactivity while fully hydrogen-covered dimers do not.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of site-specific ethylene reactivity on Si(001) with hydrogen precoverage, combining density functional theory and experimental validation.

Findings

Reactivity unchanged on fully hydrogen-covered dimers.

Partially covered dimers show over 50% reduction in reaction barrier.

Steric effects decrease reactivity on ethylene-covered dimers.

Abstract

We report differences in adsorption and reaction energetics for ethylene on Si(001) with respect to different dangling bond configurations induced by hydrogen precoverage as obtained via density functional theory calculations. This can help to understand the influence of surface defects and precoverage on the reactivity of organic molecules on semiconductor surfaces in general. Our results show that the reactivity on surface dimers fully enclosed by hydrogen covered atoms is essentially unchanged compared to the clean surface. This is confirmed by our scanning tunnelling microscopy measurements. On the contrary, adsorption sites with partially covered surface dimers show a drastic increase in reactivity. This is due to a lowering of the reaction barrier by more than fifty percent compared to the clean surface, which is in line with previous experiments. Adsorption on dimers enclosed by molecule (ethylene) covered surface atoms is reported to have a highly decreased reactivity, a result of destabilization of the intermediate state due to steric repulsion, as quantified with the periodic energy decomposition analysis (pEDA). Furthermore, an approach for the calculation of Gibbs energies of adsorption based on statistical thermodynamics considerations is applied to the system. The results show that the loss in molecular entropy leads to a significant destabilization of adsorption states.