Chemistry of oxygen ionosorption on SnO2 surfaces

Ionosorbed oxygen is the key player in reactions on metal-oxide surfaces. This is particularly evident for chemiresistive gas sensors, which operate by modulating the conductivity of active materials through the formation/removal of surface O-related acceptors. Herein, we carried out a detailed study of various charged oxygen species on three naturally occurring surfaces of SnO2. We employed first-principles calculations and revealed that two types of surface acceptors can form spontaneously upon the adsorption of atmospheric oxygen: (i) superoxide O2 (in 1- charged state) on the (110) and the (101) surfaces and (ii) doubly ionized O (in 2- charged state) on the (100) facet, with the experimental evidence pointing to the latter as the source of sensing response. In this dataset, we present the optimized geometries (in CIF format) of different O and O_2 adsorption configurations in the most relevant charged states.