AVS 50th International Symposium
    Surface Science Tuesday Sessions
       Session SS2-TuM

Paper SS2-TuM9
Pt Adsorption on Chiral SrTiO@sub3@ Surfaces

Tuesday, November 4, 2003, 11:00 am, Room 328

Session: Nucleation and Growth
Presenter: A. Asthagiri, Carnegie Mellon University
Authors: A. Asthagiri, Carnegie Mellon University
D.S. Sholl, Carnegie Mellon University
Correspondent: Click to Email
The existence of intrinsically chiral surfaces provides many opportunities related to the catalytic chemistry and separation of chiral molecules. A key difficulty in realizing the potential of this approach has been the production of surfaces with reasonable surface area. We describe results that underpin efforts to epitaxially deposit ultra-thin films of metal on metal oxide substrates. The success of these efforts requires careful control of the film morphology of the underlying substrate and knowledge of the growth modes of metal on these surfaces. To this end, we have performed extensive plane wave Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations to describe the bonding of Pt on a variety of SrTiO@sub3@ surfaces. These calculations include both terminations of all three low Miller index surfaces, (100), (110), and (111), and two representative stepped surfaces, (620) and (622). Our results show that epitaxial growth of Pt on the substrates can be expected, and that step flow growth should be feasible for the stepped substrates. Our results provide quantitative insight into the experimental observations made by our collaborators for these systems, including the existence of inversion domains for Pt films on SrTiO@sub3@(111). We will discuss the implications of our calculations for the practical growth of chiral metal films on SrTiO@sub3@ substrates.