Understanding the surface site preference for single adsorbates, the interactions between adsorbates, how these interactions affect surface site specificity in adsorption and perturb the electronic states of surfaces is important for rationalizing the structure of interfaces and the growth of surface products. Herein, using density functional theory (DFT) calculations, we investigated the adsorption of H2 S, HS and, S onto Cu(110). The surface site specificity observed for single adsorbates can be largely affected by the presence of other adsorbates, especially S that can affect the adsorption of other species even at distances of 13 Å. The large supercell employed with a surface periodicity of (6×6) allowed us to safely use the Helmholtz method for the determination of the dipole of the surface-adsorbate complex at low adsorbate coverages. We found that the surface perturbation induced by S can be explained by the charge transfer model, H2 S leads to a perturbation of the surface that arises mostly from Pauli exclusion effects, whereas HS shows a mix of charge transfer and Pauli exclusion effects. These effects have a large contribution to the long range adsorbate-adsorbate interactions observed. Further support for the long range adsorbate-adsorbate interactions are the values of the adsorption energies of adsorbate pairs that are larger than the sum of the adsorption energies of the single adsorbates that constitute the pair. This happens even for large distances and thus goes beyond the H-bond contribution for the H-bond capable adsorbate pairs. Exploiting this knowledge we investigated two models for describing the first stages of growth of a layer of S-atoms at the surface: the formation of islands versus the formation of more homogeneous surface distributions of S-atoms. We found that for coverages lower than 0.5 ML the S-atoms prefer to cluster as islands that evolve to stripes along the [1 0] direction with increasing coverage. At 0.5 ML a homogeneous distribution of S-atoms becomes more stable than the formation of stripes. For the coverage equivalent to 1 ML, the formation of two half-monolayers of S-atoms that disrupt the Cu-Cu bonds between the first and second layer is more favorable than the formation of 1 ML homogeneous coverage of S-atoms. Here the S-Cu bond distances and geometries are reminiscent of pyrite, covellite, and to some extent chalcocite. The small energy difference of ≈0.1 eV that exists between this structure and the formation of 1 ML suggests that in a real system at finite temperature both structures may coexist leading to a structure with even lower symmetry.
Keywords: adsorbate-adsorbate interactions; copper sulfide growth; hydrogen sulfide; polarizability; sulfur adsorption.
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