First-principles investigations of iridium low index surfaces

We report density functional theory (DFT) calculations for the surface energy, work function, and interlayer spacings for Ir(1 1 1), Ir(1 0 0), and Ir(1 1 0) surfaces using pseudopotential method and plane waves basis set. We investigate the convergence of the surface energy as a function of the number of layers in the slab for the Ir(1 0 0) surface. The results show that the surface energies calculated using the bulk total energies obtained by a fit to a series of slab total energies converge within 0.01 J/m². We also investigate the convergence of the work function and interlayer spacings as a function of the number of layers in the slab, for the Ir(1 0 0) surface. Employing the local-density approximation (LDA) and the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) for the exchange correlation functional, we obtained a very good agreement of the calculated surface energies and work functions with experimental results. For the studied surfaces, the calculations give interlayer relaxations that are in an excellent agreement with available low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) analysis. Furthermore, we discuss the performance of the LDA and GGA for the exchange correlation functional in describing the various surface properties. The results show that calculations using GGA give results that are in a better agreement with experiment than the LDA.