Surface Mobilities on Solid Materials pp 195-241 | Cite as

Mass Transport by Surface Self-Diffusion

There are essentially three different sources for obtaining information on the process of surface self-diffusion of crystalline materials: Firstly, direct microscopic observations of atom (molecule) motion on surfaces; secondly, semi-macroscopic observations of mass transport as related to surface self-diffusion; thirdly, the theory of surface potentials and surface mobility. The first source has been dealt with extensively by Gomer1, Bassett2 and others in previous review articles3,4,5, mainly covering experiments by fieldelectron and field-ion microscopy. The second source of information, mass transport by surface diffusion, will be the subject of this article. We will see that this information derived from mass transport experiments is complementary to the microscopic studies. Finally, as far as the theory of surface diffusion is concerned, this source is at present not very informative except for some phenomenological approaches. There are no a priori theories of the 2-dimensional adsorption potential of metal surfaces which would be able to describe the motion of single adsorbed atoms such as observed experimentally.
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