Oxygen abstraction from dioxygen on the Al(111) surface.

Abstractive chemisorption in the initial oxidation of Al(111) has been experimentally verified using variable incident energy O2. Scanning tunneling microscopy images show a transition between single O-adatom reaction products to more pairs of O-adatom reaction products as the O2 incident energy is raised from 0.025 to 0.8 eV. The ejected O atoms have been detected in the gas phase with resonant enhanced multiphoton ionization. The observations that both abstractive and dissociative chemisorption are activated processes are in contrast to current adiabatic models of the absorption process.

Abstractive chemisorption of O2 on Al(111).

We present experimental evidence that abstraction is a common mechanism (approximately 50%) in the dissociative chemisorption of oxygen on Al(111) at a translational energy of 0.5 eV. As a result of this mechanism, individual isolated O-atoms are observed in scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). At this translational energy ordinary dissociative chemisorption processes also occur, resulting in pairs of adatoms. The ejected O-atoms originating from the abstraction reaction are detected in the gas phase using laser spectrometry. Together, these observations provide compelling evidence for the abstraction mechanism.