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Theoretical study of an adsorbed metal system is made of the effects of the image-force and the adatom-phonon interactions, which are incorporated into the effects of the admixture of adatom and substrate wave functions and the Coulomb interaction of electrons on the adatom. It is shown that metastable states may appear when the image-force stabilization and/or the adatom-phonon interaction are present. The metastable states differ from the ground state in the valency of the adatom and/or the spatial configuration of the adsorbed system. The presence of the critical lines in the parameter space is pointed out, across which the ground and the metastable states are interchanged keeping the potential barrier between them. These results are discussed in connection with experiments.
Shinjo et al. (Tue,) studied this question.