Anomalous Mobility of Strongly Bound Surface Species: Cl on GaAs(001)-c(8 × 2)

Although strongly bound chemisorbates at low coverage readily diffuse on metal surfaces at 300 K, they generally do not diffuse on semiconductor surfaces because of a large corrugation in the adsorbate-surface interaction potential. Chlorine chemisorbed on the Ga-rich GaAs(001)-c(8x2) surface has anomalously fast diffusion even though the chemisorption state is tightly bound and highly specific. Simple Hartree-Fock total energy calculations suggest that this diffusion of strongly bound adsorbates can occur at 300 K because there are multiple nearly degenerate adsorbate sites.