Ehrlich–Schwöbel barriers and adsorption of Au, Cu and Ag stepped (100) surfaces

Abstract

We use a combination of quenched molecular dynamics and embedded atom method to calculate the activation energy barriers for the hopping and exchange mechanisms of Au, Ag or Cu on Au(100), Ag(100) or Cu(100) stepped surfaces. Our findings show that the Ehrlich–Schwöbel (ES) barriers for an adatom to undergo jump or exchange at a step edge are found to be dependent of the nature of substrate stepped surfaces. We also find that the ES barriers for the hopping processes are too high, except for Cu/Au(100). While for exchange process the Ehrlich–Schwöbel barriers are found to be very low and even negative. These ES barriers can explain the difference in the growth modes for the different systems. On the other hand, we calculated the adsorption energies at the most stable adsorption sites near step edges. In particular, we wish to clarify the relation between the adatom diffusion energy barriers and the adatom adsorption energies. These results may serve as some guiding rules for studying stepped surface morphologies, which are of importance to surface nanoengineering.