Two-bath model for activated surface diffusion of interacting adsorbates

R. Martinez-Casado, A. S. Sanz, G. Rojas-Lorenzo, S. Miret-Artes

Published 2008-10-10, updated 2010-02-05Version 2

The diffusion and low vibrational motions of adsorbates on surfaces can be well described by a purely stochastic model, the so-called interacting single adsorbate model, for low-moderate coverages (\theta \lesssim 0.12). Within this model, the effects of thermal surface phonons and adsorbate-adsorbate collisions are accounted for by two uncorrelated noise functions which arise in a natural way from a two-bath model based on a generalization of the one-bath Caldeira-Leggett Hamiltonian. As an illustration, the model is applied to the diffusion of Na atoms on a Cu(001) surface with different coverages.