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Abstract The Born–Oppenheimer approximation is the keystone of modern computational chemistry and there is wide interest in understanding under what conditions it remains valid. Hydrogen atom scattering from insulator, semi-metal and metal surfaces has helped provide such information. The approximation is adequate for insulators and for metals it fails, but not severely. Here we present hydrogen atom scattering from a semiconductor surface: Ge(111) c (2 × 8). Experiments show bimodal energy-loss distributions revealing two channels. Molecular dynamics trajectories within the Born–Oppenheimer approximation reproduce one channel quantitatively. The second channel transfers much more energy and is absent in simulations. It grows with hydrogen atom incidence energy and exhibits an energy-loss onset equal to the Ge surface bandgap. This leads us to conclude that hydrogen atom collisions at the surface of a semiconductor are capable of promoting electrons from the valence to the conduction band with high efficiency. Our current understanding fails to explain these observations. 

A quantitative understanding of the role played by defect sites in heterogeneous catalysis is of great importance in designing new and more effective catalysts. In this work, we report a detailed dynamic study of a key step in methane steam reforming under experimentally relevant conditions on a new high-dimensional potential energy surface determined from first principles data with the aid of machine learning, with which the interactions of CH 4 with both the flat Ir(111) and stepped Ir(332) surfaces are described. In particular, we argue based on our simulations that the experimentally observed “negatively activated” dissociative chemisorption of methane on Ir surfaces could be due to a combined effect of defects and high substrate temperature, which lowers the reaction barrier relative to that on terraces. Furthermore, a model based on dynamic information of trapping and reaction channels is proposed, which allows a quantitative prediction of the initial sticking probability for different defect densities, thus helping to close the so-called structure gap in heterogeneous catalysis.