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This paper reviews the current situation in the understanding of alkali adsorption on metal surfaces, with particular emphasis on recent structural discoveries. We start by describing the classical `Langmuir - Gurney' model for alkali adsorption and the challenges to it which arose in the mid 1980s. We then describe the results of structural studies from the early 1990s which provide a whole new set of phenomena to be explicable within the framework of a new paradigm, and discuss whether calculations based on density-functional theory constitute such a paradigm.
Diehl et al. (Mon,) studied this question.