There is a great deal of knowledge about the oxidation of metal surfaces on macroscopic scales, but very little is known about how the process starts at the smallest molecular scales. Understanding the oxidation phenomena that occur at such nanometer (one billionth the size of a meter) length scales is of both scientific and technological importance, since more and more materials are being engineered at nanometer scales for practical applications. The stability of such nanoscale materials cannot necessarily be inferred directly from the knowledge about their bulk counterparts, and new theories are needed to predict material properties at such small scales. This collaborative project brings together a theoretical chemist who will model the individual reaction mechanisms of the oxidation of a copper surface, a theoretical physicist who will combine these mechanisms in a statistical model of the oxide growth kinetics, and finally an experimental microscopist who can watch the growth of nanometer scale oxide islands with an electron microscope. This research team will work together to understand the initial oxidation of copper surface, from the atomic scale on and up. New simulation methodologies will be developed as part of this effort. The software that will be developed and used to model the oxidation will be released freely to other researchers and to the public. The techniques will also be incorporated into graduate-level courses and as part of high-school outreach programs both in Austin, TX and Pittsburgh, PA.
This award supports a collaborative research and education effort between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Texas at Austin for developing materials computational tools that can be used to model nano-oxidation, and to correlate computational predictions with experimental observations. The PIs will integrate versatile codes for modeling dynamics at surfaces and address three key challenges in the proposed research, which are (i) to use accelerated dynamics methods and off-lattice adaptive kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) with empirical potentials and density functional theory to extract the reaction mechanisms of surface oxidation, (ii) to continue the development of the Thin Film Oxidation KMC approach, particularly taking it from 2 to 3 dimensions, and (iii) to develop a method for coarse graining the representations of reaction mechanisms found with adaptive KMC to provide the event tables for the three-dimensional Thin Film Oxidation code. These studies will provide realistic input parameters for the Thin Film Oxidation simulations, allow for critical insights to be made into the nucleation behavior, morphological evolution of oxide islands during nano-oxidation and coalescence, and provide the surface and interface energies required to understand island stability. This collaboration builds on existing infrastructure, including the experimental electron microscopy effort in Pittsburgh and the theoretical and software efforts in Austin and Pittsburgh. This research team will work together to understand the initial oxidation of a copper surface, from the atomic scale on and up. The software that will be used to model the oxidation will be released freely to other researchers and to the public. The techniques will also be incorporated into graduate-level courses and as part of high-school outreach programs both in Austin and Pittsburgh.
