Interaction of H2 with simple metal surfaces: a model based on the anisotropic effective medium theory

Abstract Calculations are presented for the interaction of H 2 with surfaces of Cu, Ag, Au and Al. The repulsive part of the potential is evaluated using the results of anisotropic effective medium theory (AEMT) while the attractive part is calculated from anisotropic damped dipole-dipole and damped dipole-quadrupole interactions. The model does not have any fitting parameters and its predictions are in excellent agreement with the available experimental data. The anisotropy of H 2 is included in the model but our results show that this effect is very small.