UC Berkeley

The facet-specific interaction between molecules and crystalline catalysts, such as titanium dioxides (TiO₂), has attracted much attention due to possible facet-dependent reactivity. Using surface-sensitive sum-frequency vibrational spectroscopy, we have studied how methanol interacts with different common facets of crystalline TiO₂, including rutile(110), (001), (100), and anatase(101), under ambient temperature and pressure. We found that methanol adsorbs predominantly in the molecular form on all of the four surfaces, while spontaneous dissociation into methoxy occurs preferentially when these surfaces become defective. Extraction of Fermi resonance coupling between stretch and bending modes of the methyl group in analyzing adsorbed methanol spectra allows determination of the methanol adsorption isotherm. The isotherms obtained for the four surfaces are nearly the same, yielding two adsorbed Gibbs free energies associated with two different adsorption configurations singled out by ab initio calculations. They are (i) ∼-20 kJ/mol for methanol with its oxygen attached to a low-coordinated surface titanium, and (ii) ∼-5 kJ/mol for methanol hydrogen-bonded to a surface oxygen and a neighboring methanol molecule. Despite similar adsorption energetics, the Fermi resonance coupling strength for adsorbed methanol appears to depend sensitively on the surface facet and coverage.