Ab-initio modelling, polarity and energetics of clean rutile surfaces in vacuum and comparison with water environment

All terminations of the (1x1) rutile (110), (101), (001), (100) and (111) surfaces are classified according to their electrostatic polarity. Six are found to be non-polar. The plane-wave density functional theory code CASTEP is used with a GGA-PBE exchange-correlation functional and a vacuum/material slab supercell method to calculate the surface energy density of symmetric thin rutile films with the six non-polar terminations in vacuum. The ratio of the surface energy densities of a rutile crystal with {111} and {110} facets in water is deduced using Lagrange multipliers and found to be consistent with the DFT vacuum results.