This award supports one or two graduate students from Dr. John Yates's group at the University of Pittsburgh to collaborate with Dieter Fick of the Department of Physics at the Phillips University in Marburg. The collaboration will study one of the most important aspects of surface chemistry having to do with the determination of the kinetics of migration of adsorbed species across surfaces. The model system to be studied is the diffusion of lithium atoms on ruthenium single-crystal surfaces having periodic arrays of atomic steps. The goal is to determine the role of surface steps and co-adsorbate interactions on the activation barrier for lithium atom migration. The diffusion measurement will take place in Germany using a novel NMR technique, which has shown superior sensitivity to the phenomena under study.
