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Science 24 August 2007:
Vol. 317. no. 5841, pp. 1052 - 1056
DOI: 10.1126/science.1144787
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Reports

Electron-Induced Oxygen Desorption from the TiO2(011)-2x1 Surface Leads to Self-Organized Vacancies

Olga Dulub,1 Matthias Batzilln,2 Sergey Solovev,3 Elena Loginova,3 Alim Alchagirov,1 Theodore E. Madey,3 Ulrike Diebold1*

When low-energy electrons strike a titanium dioxide surface, they may cause the desorption of surface oxygen. Oxygen vacancies that result from irradiating a TiO2(011)-2x1 surface with electrons with an energy of 300 electron volts were analyzed by scanning tunneling microscopy. The cross section for desorbing oxygen from the pristine surface was found to be 9 (±6) x 10–17 square centimeters, which means that the initial electronic excitation was converted into atomic motion with a probability near unity. Once an O vacancy had formed, the desorption cross sections for its nearest and next-nearest oxygen neighbors were reduced by factors of 100 and 10, respectively. This site-specific desorption probability resulted in one-dimensional arrays of oxygen vacancies.

1 Department of Physics, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA.
2 Department of Physics, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA.
3 Department of Physics and Astronomy and Laboratory for Surface Modification, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08855, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: diebold{at}tulane.edu

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Activity of CeOx and TiOx Nanoparticles Grown on Au(111) in the Water-Gas Shift Reaction.
J. A. Rodriguez, S. Ma, P. Liu, J. Hrbek, J. Evans, and M. Perez (2007)
Science 318, 1757-1760
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