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Adsorption of C2H2 on PdGa(111)

In this exercise you will compute the adsorption energy of acetylene on a intermetallic catalyst. This process is important during the production of polyethylene, and the system is described in this paper: 10.1021%2Fja505936b.

In the first part of the exercise you will consider the optimized configuration (already in the directory) and study the pure electronic adsorption energy, namely the difference between the total energy of the surface-molecule system and the energy of the molecule alone and surface alone in the same geometry as the surface-molecule system minimum structure. This will allow to show the binding pattern of the electronic density.
In the second part, you will optimize the surface and the molecule separately; this will allow to compute the total adsorption energy.

1. Task: Familiarize yourself

The coordinates of the optimized configuration are provided to you as S_M.opt.xyz (S stands for “Substrate”, M for “Molecule”, opt for “optimized”). Visualize the geometry with VMD and familiarize yourself with the system.