OXYGEN-CHEMISORPTION ON METAL-SURFACES - GENERAL TRENDS FOR CU, NI AND AG

A review is given of our present understanding of the chemisorption of oxygen on metal surfaces such as Cu, Ni, and Ag. We will survey the experimental results with special emphasis on how recent scanning tunneling microscopy results for the dynamics of oxygen-induced reconstructions in many cases give new insight also into the static surface structures. We will extract and discuss the general trends, similarities, and differences from the experimental observations. From an interplay between experiment and theory, a simple coherent picture has emerged which is capable of explaining many of the experimental observations. This picture will be discussed in some depth.