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This thesis explores the interactions of ethylamine and the Cu(111) surface. The main motivation behind this work is the production of acetonitrile, an incredibly useful solvent in the pharmaceutical industry which is currently produced mainly as a byproduct of the Sohio acrylonitrile production process. This dependency has led to shortages in the past and so there is a need for an alternative. A ... read morepreferred method would be cheap, sustainable and proceed via a dehydrogenation reaction rather than an oxidation reaction. Through STM and TPD data, this work suggests that the steps of Cu(111) have the ability to anaerobically dehydrogenate ethylamine to acetonitrile at around 320 K without water on the surface. These results also showed that there is a competing decomposition reaction occurring on the surface at temperatures above 340 K. While the main products of this decomposition reaction, besides hydrogen gas, remain elusive, results imply that small amounts of ammonia and ethene form. In addition to these reactions, ethylamine forms a rotor when bound to the Cu(111) surface. This rotor exhibits lateral repulsion with other surface bound ethylamine molecules preventing clustering regardless of coverage or annealing temperature. This repulsion also leads to very broad peaks when it desorbs molecularly from the surface.read less
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