Acknowledgement

This work has been realised in the department of physical chemistry and electrochemistry in the Technical University of Dresden directed by Prof. Dr. Gothard Seifert and under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Heine.

I would like to express my gratitude to the Head of the department Prof. Dr. Gotthard Seifert who gave me the opportunity to accomplish this interesting work

To my supervisor Dr. Thomas Heine with whom I had the honour to work and who has introduced and guided me through the topic of my thesis.

This work would not be possible without the help of my colleagues and friends. I would like to specially thank to:

Dr. Serguei Patchkovskii and Dr. Serguei Yurchenko for their advices, great ideas and the program code which was used in the computational simulations.

Dr. Tzonka Mineva for refereeing this work and for her collaboration and help.

The referees and the members of the commission who accepted to judge this work.

Knut Vietze for the support and the fruitful discussions of physics, programing and German beer.

Dr. Boris Naidenov, Dr. Byan Jonev, Dr. Sandrine Hazebroucq, Dr. Andrey Enyashin for the nice time spent in Germany.

To Nina who shares my life for several years and whose patience and support deserve a lot more than just to be thankful...

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Stiftung Energieforschung Baden-Württemberg, and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.