Electronic excitations and surface chemistry

Reactions at Solid Surfaces. By Gerhard Ertl Copyright 2009 John Wiley Sons, Inc. 

This chapter is essentially concerned with effects characteristic of electronically excited states (i) surface reactions causing electronic excitations, which may be directly analyzed, and (ii) controlled electronic excitations leading to surface reactions. 

In molecular reactions, electronic excitations as a consequence of the chemical transformation are often associated with light emission called chemiluminescence. As outlined in Section 3.1, with metal surfaces the relaxation times of electronic excitations (from delocalized band states) are much shorter ( r j 10 s) than those for photons s), so this decay channel will be operat- 

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