Dynamical Phenomena at Surfaces: The Role of Complexity

To a large extent, dynamical phenomena at surfaces determine the interaction of solid bodies with their surroundings. Elementary dynamical processes occurring at surfaces and interfaces form the basis of heterogeneous catalysis, and are important to, for example, energy applications, and astrochemistry. To further our understanding of these processes, which underlie for example chemical reactions at surfaces, but also thin film growth, a close collaboration between theorists and experimentalists is essential.

The meeting will address the topics that are currently “hot” in the field, for instance because new experimental and/or theoretical methods have recently become available or are expected to become available any moment to address particularly challenging questions. We name a few examples here that will be addressed at the workshop. It has recently become possible to model surface reactions using ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD), and reactive force fields (RFFs), making it possible for the first time to address the influence of surface motion and energy transfer to phonons in a highly accurate manner on short time scales (AIMD), or with somewhat less accuracy, but on longer timescales (RFFs). Experiments on electron emission induced by collisions of highly vibrationally excited molecules with surfaces have revolutionised the field of non-adiabatic scattering from metal surfaces. Finally, fully understanding friction will have a crucial impact not only in science but also economically since the direct cost of wear and friction amounts to 10% of the gross national product of industrialized nations. Recent experimental and theoretical approaches bring us closer to this goal and offer fascinating insight to the microscopic mechanisms.

The “red thread” through the meeting that ties all sessions together is the issue of complexity that arises once surfaces come into play. The central question addressed in all sessions will be two-fold: (i) how can we solve the problems associated with the complexity of the surface, and (ii) how can we take advantage of the complexity a surface inherently has, or can take on?

The workshop we plan will be the fifteenth in a series of workshops on dynamical phenomena at surfaces (WDPS15). The first workshop, which was held about 30 years ago, focused on questions related to the lattice dynamics of clean metal surfaces and their investigation by He-scattering methods. The workshop series (a workshop is held every 2-3 years) has become successful by constantly shifting its emphasis to those topics representing new challenges on which fast progress is made or expected to be made round and about the time of the meeting. The workshop being organized fits in this “tradition” by addressing currently “hot topics” as discussed above, which are connected by the “red thread” of complexity.

The workshop will start on Monday morning at 9 am with registration and will end on Friday afternoon at 4 pm. There will be 18 invited talks. There will also be 11 shorter contributed talks. To make optimal use of the facilities of the Lorentz center we will schedule formal group discussions on the themes of the sessions on the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. From the attending post-docs and graduate students, the best three poster presenters will be selected to present Young investigator talks (three (15 + 5) minutes talks), using a ballot. Poster presenters who would like their poster to be considered for such a talk (to be presented on the last day of the meeting) should come prepared to present their work in a short talk also.

Sessions and invited speakers:

Probing surface dynamics at the ultrafast time-scale

Martin Wolf, Fritz Haber Institute, Berlin, Germany

Fabrizio Carbone, EPFL, Switzerland

New approaches to understanding friction

Joost Frenken, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Astrid de Wijn, Stockholm University, Sweden

Chirality in two dimensions

Rasmita Raval, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom.

Steven de Feyter, KU Leuven, Belgium

Molecular Machines on Surfaces

Karl-Heinz Ernst, EMPA, Zürich, Switzerland

Leonard Grill, Fritz-Haber Institute, Berlin, Germany

Dynamics of chemical reactions at Surfaces

Bret Jackson University of Massachusetts at Amherst, US

Cristina Díaz, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain

Ab initio molecular dynamics and reactive forcefields

Axel Groß, University of Ulm, Germany

Fabio Busnengo, Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina

Theory of molecule-surface interactions

Georg Kresse, University of Vienna, Austria

Florian Libisch, Princeton University, US

Astrochemical applications of Surface Science

Naoki Watanabe, Hokkaido University, Japan

Liv Hornekær, Aarhus University, Denmark

Non-adiabatic dynamics at Surfaces

Alec Wodtke, MPI Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, Germany

Aart Kleijn, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands