Dissociative versus molecular adsorption of phenol on Si(100)2x1: A first-principles calculation

We investigated the competitive adsorption of a bifunctional molecule, phenol, on Si(100)2x1 by ab initio calculations. We performed geometry optimizations of phenol adsorbed either molecularly or dissociatively, on five possible sites (top, bridge, valley bridge, cave, and pedestal), in the low coverage regime. We found that the dissociative adsorption of phenol on top of a silicon dimer is the most favorable adsorption configuration. In the group of dissociative adsorption the phenol initially placed on the bridge or the valley-bridge sites ends up as a toplike local minima. The pedestal and cave sites remain as low-adsorption energy "open" sites. In the group of molecular adsorption, a higher adsorption energy is associated to the adsorption through an addition reaction and loss of the aromatic character (bridge, valley-bridge, and pedestal sites). Standard butterfly or diagonal butterfly are the corresponding optimized geometries. Retention of aromatic character and lower adsorption energy are associated to the adsorption on the top and cave sites. The ordering of adsorption sites according to the adsorption energy shows a mixture of the dissociative and the molecular sites. In the case of adsorption on the top site, the adsorption energies after a rotation of the phenoxy fragment along the bonding axis and hydrogen migration on the surface are very similar. The bend of the phenoxy fragment on the surface, instead, is not favored (the adsorption energy is 1.004 eV lower compared to the vertical position). Different electron density maps were calculated for different adsorption sites and modes. Finally, we investigated the possibility that molecularly adsorbed phenol behaves as a precursor for the dissociative one by nudged elastic band calculations. We found a barrier of the same order of magnitude of the thermodynamic energy at room temperature for the conversion of the valley-bridge molecular into the top dissociative site.