Nonequilibrium stationary microstructures in surface chemical reactions

Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Faradayweg 4-6, D-14195 Berlin, Germany~Received 14 July 1998!Adsorbates with attractive lateral interactions between molecules in the presence of adsorption and thermaldesorption are considered. We show that a sufficiently strong nonequilibrium reaction or the process ofphotoinduced desorption can destabilize uniform stationary phases of the adsorbates and lead to nonequilib-rium microstructures whose wavelength is typically shorter than the diffusion length and may hence be on themicrometer to nanometer scale. Despite their small sizes, such microstructures are not destroyed by internalstatistical fluctuations. @S1063-651X~98!03511-9#PACS number~s!: 82.20.Mj, 47.54.1r, 68.10.Jy, 82.65.JvI. INTRODUCTION