Competition between direct and concerted movements in surface diffusion with application to the Au(110) surface

Recent calculations of the energetic barriers for diffusion of Au atoms on the Au(110) surface have shown that for moves perpendicular to the close-packed atomic rows, concerted, or multi-atom movements are energetically favorable over single-atom movements for the same displacement. Entropic hindrances, however are expected to limit concerted moves. In the present paper this competition is investigated via simulation techniques based on model potentials that reproduce the relevant energtic and entropic features of the Au(110) situation. Apparently non-Arrhenius behavior is found for the concerted motions. A new scheme, which avoids the necessity of long simulation runs to determine the “hop” rate at several temperatures, for determining entropic barriers directly is proposed and tested. Though this method is applied in the present context to a simplified model for the interatomic potentials, it can be straightforwardly extended to realistic treatments of those interactions.