Theoretical study of atomic oxygen on gold surface by Hückel theory and DFT calculations.

It is fundamental to understand the behavior of atomic oxygen on gold surfaces so as to elucidate the mechanism of nano gold catalysts for low-temperature CO oxidation reactions since the atomic oxygen on gold system is an important intermediate involved in both the processes of O(2) dissociation and CO oxidation. We performed theoretical analysis of atomic oxygen adsorption on gold by using Hückel theory. It is found that formation of linear O-Au-O structure on Au surfaces greatly stabilizes the atomic oxygen adsorption due to stronger bond energy and bond order, which is confirmed subsequently by density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The linear O-Au-O structure may explain the surprising first order kinetics behavior of O(2) desorption from gold surfaces. This view of the linear O-Au-O structure as the natural adsorption status is quite different from the conventional view, which may lead to new understanding toward the reaction mechanism of low-temperature CO oxidation reaction on nano gold catalysts.