Trapping-mediated dissociative chemisorption of ethane on Ir(110)-(1×2)

Evidence is presented to support a trapping-mediated dissociative chemisorption mechanism for ethane interacting with an Ir(110)-(1×2) surface. The data were obtained from supersonic molecular-beam measurements with an incident kinetic energy Ei ranging between 1.2 and 24.1 kcal/mol, a surface temperature Ts between 154 and 500 K, and an incident angle θi between 0° and 45°. For Ei less than approximately 13 kcal/mol, the probability of dissociative chemisorption S0 decreases rapidly with increasing Ts. For a surface temperature of 154 K, S0 decreases with increasing Ei for 1.2≤Ei ≤13.4 kcal/mol, consistent with a trapping-mediated chemisorption mechanism. Indeed, the data also support quantitatively a kinetic model consistent with a trapping-mediated chemisorption mechanism. The difference in the activation energies for desorption and chemisorption from the physically adsorbed, trapped state Ed −Ec is 2.2±0.2 kcal/mol. In the trapping-mediated regime, S0 is found to be rather insensitive to incident angle, scaling with Ei cos0.5 θi .