Study of surfaces and interfaces using quantum chemistry techniques

Abstract

There are a number of difficulties in elucidating the microscopic details of the electronic states at surfaces and interfaces. The first step should be to determine the structure at the surface or interface, but this is difficult experimentally even for the clean, ordered surface and extremely difficult for cases with impurity atoms (e.g., nonordered oxide layers). The theoretical study of such geometries and energy surfaces is the subject of quantum chemistry. We present a review of some of the theoretical techniques from quantum chemistry that are being applied to surfaces. The procedure consists of treating a finite piece of the surface or interface as a molecule. Ab initio calculations are then carried out on the molecule using the generalized valence bond (GVB) method (with additional configuration interaction), thereby incorporating the dominant many‐body effects. The reliability of these techniques is discussed by giving some examples from molecular chemistry and the surfaces of solids. The strengths and weaknesses of this approach are compared with more traditional band theory related methods and are illustrated with various examples.