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The material in this book has been published in two articles in Angewandte Chemic and Reviews of Modern Physics, and I express my gratitude to the editors of these journals for their encouragement and assistance. The construction of the book based on those articles was suggested by my friend M. V. Basilevsky.

My graduate students, postdoctoral associates, and senior visitors to the group are responsible for both teaching me solid state physics and implementing the algorithms and computer programs that have made this work possible. While in my usual way I’ve suppressed the computations in favor of explanations, little understanding would have come without those computations. An early contribution to our work was made by Chien-Chuen Wan, but the real computational and interpretational advances came through the work of Myung-Hwan Whangbo, Charles Wilker, Miklos Kertesz, Tim Hughbanks, Sunil Wijeyesekera, and Chong Zheng. This book very much reflects their ingenuity and perseverance. Several crucial ideas were borrowed early on from Jeremy Burdett, such as using special k-point sets for properties.

Al Anderson was instrumental in getting me started in thinking about applying extended Hückel calculations to surfaces. A coupling of the band approach to an interaction diagram and frontier orbital way of thinking evolved from the study Jean-Yves Saillard carried out of molecular and surface C–H activation. We learned a lot together. A subsequent collaboration with Jérome Silvestre helped to focus many of the ideas in this book. Important contributions were also made by Christian Minot, Dennis Underwood, Shen-shu Sung, Georges Trinquier, Santiago Alvarez, Joel Bernstein, Yitzhak Apeloig, Daniel Zeroka, Douglas Keszler, William Bleam, Ralph Wheeler, Marja Zonnevylle, Susan Jansen, Wolfgang Tremel, Dragan Vučkovič, and Jing Li.

An important factor in the early stages of this work was my renewed collaboration with R. B. Woodward, prompted by our joint interest in organic conductors. Our collaboration was unfortunately cut short by his death in 1979- Thor Rhodin was mainly responsible for introducing me to the riches of surface chemistry and physics, and I am grateful to him and his students. It was always instructive to try to provoke John Wilkins.

Over the years my research has been steadily supported by the National Science Foundation’s Chemistry Division. I owe Bill Cramer and his fellow program directors thanks for their continued support. A special role in my group’s research on extended structures was played by the Materials Science Center (MSC) at Cornell University, supported by the Materials Research Division of the National Science Foundation. MSC furnished an interdisciplinary setting, which facilitated an interaction among researchers in the surface science and solid state areas that was very effective in introducing a novice to the important work in the field. I am grateful to Robert E. Hughes, Herbert H. Johnson, and Robert H. Silsbee, the MSC directors, for providing that supporting structure. In the last five years my surface-related research has been generously supported by the Office of Naval Research. That support is in the form of a joint research program with John Wilkins.

One reason it is easy to cross disciplines at Cornell is the existence of the Physical Sciences Library, with its broad coverage of chemistry and physics. I would like to thank Ellen Thomas and her staff for her contributions in that regard. Our drawings, a critical part of the way our research is presented, have been beautifully prepared over the years by Jane Jorgensen and Elisabeth Fields. I’d like to thank Eleanor Stagg, Linda Kapitany, and Lorraine Seager for their typing and secretarial assistance.

This manuscript was written while I held the Tage Erlander Professorship of the Swedish Science Research Council, NFR. The hospitality of Professor Per Siegbahn and the staff of the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Stockholm and of Professor Sten Andersson and his crew at the Department of Inorganic Chemistry at the Technical University of Lund is gratefully acknowledged.

Finally, this book is dedicated to two men, colleagues of mine at Cornell in their time. They are no longer with us. Earl Muetterties played an important role in introducing me to inorganic and organometallic chemistry. Our interest in surfaces grew together. Mike Sienko and his students offered gentle encouragement by showing us the interesting structures on which they worked; Mike also taught me something about the relationship between research and teaching. This book is for them—both Earl Muetterties and Mike Sienko—who were so important and dear to me.