Metal Oxides Containing D and F Electrons: a New Challenge in Surface Science Temperature Dependence of Surface Energies of Oxides

Many of the transition metal oxides (i.e. oxide materials where metal ions contain d-electrons) exhibit high catalytic activity and are widely used in industrial applications. A recent discovery of the possibility of using U 3 O 8 for the catalytic destruction of a range of environment pollutants has stimulated research aimed at investigating the connection between the catalytic activity of transition metal and actinide oxides and the electronic structures of their surfaces. It was shown experimentally at the Department of Materials, University of Oxford, that many of the oxide materials , which are room temperature insulators, can be imaged in a scanning tunnelling microscope at an elevated temperature 1]. Theoretical study of electronic structure and STM images 2],,3] based on the LSDA+U approach have led to the conclusion that strong d-d and f-f electron correlations are responsible for unusual electronic properties of a number of transition metal and actinide oxides. The contents of the talk will cover both experimental and theoretical aspects of this work.