  Current contradictory understanding of passivation comes from overly-complex
passive models, defective characterization and misplaced theoretical
approaches. From brand-new experimentation, we find that a Ti passive membrane
has spatiotemporally-ordered macrostructure. At the start, a
thermodynamically-stable chemisorbed Ti-O monolayer is immediately formed to
inactivate the outmost Ti atoms and shield direct reaction of environmental
oxygens on metallic matrix, and then an underneath TiOx@Ti ceramet-like
non-equilibrium gradient oxide layer rapidly forms. The two layers work
synergistically to keep the macro-ordered passive membrane growing slowly via
non-linear mechanism of incremental oxidation damping, thus effecting
passivation. These findings disprove "the adsorption theory of passivation" and
"the theory of passivity film" and inform a new theory we call "passivation
theory of incremental oxidation damping".
