A phenomenological explanation for the buckling of surface alloys

A phenomenological model, in which the interactions between the nearest-neighbor (NN) atoms are described as bondings but not hard sphere contacts, is proposed to explain the unexpected reduced buckling in surface alloy systems. In the model, the forces acting on an adsorbate atom from its NN substrate atoms in different layers may be either repulsive or attractive, depending on whether the bond between the adsorbate atom and its NN substrate atoms is compressed or stretched. It is found that the forces on the adsorbate atom from its NN substrate atoms in the sub-surface layer play a more important role for the buckling of surface alloy than those from its NN substrate atoms in the surface layer do. The bucklings expected by the model are significantly smaller than those predicted by the simple hard sphere model and are in good agreement with the experiments when the equilibrium bond length of the NN adsorbate–substrate atom pairs is taken as the sum of the corresponding metal radii.