Theoretical studies of adatom diffusion on metal surfaces

We propose in this paper a theoretical model to investigate surface self-diffusion of single adatoms on two different low-index planes, closely packed (001) and densely packed (111), of face-centered-cubic rhodium, nickel and copper metal crystals. Two realistic model potentials are applied to describe the interatomic interaction of the adatom-substrate systems. The first model is a Morse-type potential, which involves several empirical fittings of bulk of solid. The second, newly popular, potential was introduced by Sutton and Che, which incorporates many-body effects. With these potentials, conventional molecular dynamics (MD) is employed to obtain trajectories of the atoms. The average squared didplacements are computed for a range of initial kinetic energies, and the surface diffusion constants can be obtained by means of the Einstein relation. The estimated random walk exponential prefactors and activation energies exhibit an Arrhenius behavior, and are compared with previous results.