A simple method for calculating the corrugation of metal surfaces Original Research Article

We present a simple method to introduce corrugation into jellium-type models for metal surfaces. As our reference we take a one-dimensional system that is homogeneous parallel to the surface, and expand the density functional in the three-dimensional correction. By choosing a suitable family of trial functions we calculate the corrugation up to second order in the perturbation. Our results compare well with calculations based on a full three-dimensional treatment. An application to charged surfaces suggests that the electronic corrugation is larger for a positively than for a negatively charged surface. Our method should be particularly useful in the modeling of complex interfaces.