Factors of chemical activity of metal surface

In this work, the factors of the chemical activity of the metal surface are studied in terms of their physical nature. The concepts of chemical bonding, e.g., the equalizaton of electronegativities and maximum chemical hardness, are related to the theories of a metal surface response to external electromagnetic excitations. The metal surface is considered in terms of the electronic gas edge model (Kohn and Mattsson). The equations of the Landau-Migdal theory of the electronic Fermi liquid are used to describe the effect of a field’s interactions with electrons. An analysis of the solution of a system of equations showed that the parameters of the metal system’s response to the external electric field (chemical potential of the electron and local and integral density of one-particle electronic levels near the Fermi level) are identical to the main characteristics of its chemical activity according to Yang and Parr (Yang, W., Parr, R.G., “Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. United States,” 1985, vol. 82, p. 6723): electronegativity, local and global chemical softness. The model under consideration contains no artifacts. The authors believe that the method is promising for further studies of fundamentals of the nature of physicochemical phenomena at interfaces.