The Born-Oppenheimer approximation of uncoupled electronic and nuclear motion is a standard tool of the computational chemist. However, its validity for molecule–metal surface reactions, which are important to heterogeneous catalysis, has been questioned because of the possibility of electron-hole pair excitations. We have performed experiments and calculations on the scattering of molecular hydrogen from a catalytically relevant metal surface, obtaining absolute probabilities for changes in the molecule's velocity parallel to the representative Pt(111) surface. The comparison for in-plane and out-of-plane scattering and results for dissociative chemisorption in the same system show that for hydrogen-metal systems, reaction and diffractive scattering can be accurately described using the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.

The dispersion and the damping of the sheet plasmon in a graphene monolayer grown on Pt(111) have been studied by using angle-resolved electron energy loss spectroscopy. We found that the dispersion relation of the plasmon mode confined in the graphene sheet is linear, as a consequence of the screening by the metal substrate. Present results demonstrate that the presence of an underlying metal substrate could have striking consequences on the plasmon propagation even in the case of a system which exhibits a weak graphene-substrate interaction. Moreover, we found that Landau damping essentially occurs via interband excitations starting above the Fermi wave vector. On the contrary, intraband transitions do not have a significant influence on the collective mode.