Reactive and nonreactive scattering of N2 from Ru(0001): a six-dimensional adiabatic study.

We have studied the dissociative chemisorption and scattering of N(2) on and from Ru(0001), using a six-dimensional quasiclassical trajectory method. The potential energy surface, which depends on all the molecular degrees of freedom, has been built applying a modified Shepard interpolation method to a data set of results from density functional theory, employing the RPBE generalized gradient approximation. The frozen surface and Born-Oppenheimer [Ann. Phys. (Leipzig) 84, 457 (1927)] approximations were used, neglecting phonons and electron-hole pair excitations. Dissociative chemisorption probabilities are found to be very small even for translational energies much higher than the minimum reaction barrier, in good agreement with experiment. A comparison to previous low dimensional calculations shows the importance of taking into account the multidimensional effects of N(2) rotation and translation parallel to the surface. The new calculations strongly suggest a much smaller role of nonadiabatic effects than previously assumed on the basis of a comparison between low dimensional results and experiments [J. Chem. Phys. 115, 9028 (2001)]. Also in agreement with experiment, our theoretical results show a strong dependence of reaction on the initial vibrational state. Computed angular scattering distributions and parallel translation energy distributions are in good agreement with experiments on scattering, but the theory overestimates vibrational and rotational excitations in scattering.