Role of Rotational Motion in the Dissociative Adsorption and Associative Desorption Dynamics of D2/Cu(111)

We point out the importance of the incidence energy of D2 to account for the nonmonotonic behavior of the adsorption probability of D2/Cu(111) as a function of its initial rotational state. We then show that a very prominent initial cooling, a mild heating, and then a final cooling of the rotational temperature with respect to the surface temperature, for increasing rotational energies, should be observed for the desorption of D2 from Cu(111). We finally show that the desorption results could be consistently connected with the adsorption probability data. copyright 1997 The American Physical Society