Institut für Angewandte Physik,
TU Wien, 1040 Wien, Austria
State Key Laboratory for
Physical Chemistry of Solid Surfaces, Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemistry for Energy Materials, and Department of Chemistry, College of Chemistry and
Chemical Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China
Faculty of Physics and Center for Computational Materials Science, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Materials Science and Technology Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, U.S.A.
Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Universita di Bologna, 40127 Bologna, Italy
epartment of Surface and Plasma Science, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, 180 00 Prague 8, Czech Republic
Polarizable materials attract attention in catalysis because they have a free parameter for tuning chemical reactivity. Their surfaces entangle the dielectric polarization with surface polarity, excess charge, and orbital hybridization. How this affects individual adsorbed molecules is shown for the incipient ferroelectric perovskite KTaO3. This intrinsically polar material cleaves along (001) into KO- and TaO2-terminated surface domains. At TaO2 terraces, the polarity-compensating excess electrons form a two-dimensional electron gas and can also localize by coupling to ferroelectric distortions. TaO2 terraces host two distinct types of CO molecules, adsorbed at equivalent lattice sites but charged differently as seen in atomic force microscopy/scanning tunneling microscopy. Temperature-programmed desorption shows substantially stronger binding of the charged CO; in density functional theory calculations, the excess charge favors a bipolaronic configuration coupled to the CO. These results pinpoint how adsorption states couple to ferroelectric polarization.
Corresponding author: Cesare Franchini.
You can download a PDF file of this open-access article from Science Advances or from the IAP/TU Wien web server.