Angular distribution of backscattered electrons with excitation of phonons and plasmons

M.A. VICENTE ALVAREZ; G. ZAMPIERI

PHYSICAL REVIEW B - CONDENSED MATTER AND MATERIALS PHYSICS

American Physical Society

Lugar: New York; Año: 1998 vol. 58 p. 16378 - 16386

0163-1829

The "elastic" backscattering of electrons from crystalline surfaces has two regimes: at low energies the angular distribution has the narrow peaks characteristic of the Bragg diffraction, but at medium energies the angular distribution changes and becomes similar to that observed in Auger and x-ray photoelectron diffraction. We have presented recently a model that explains this change of the angular distribution in terms of the excitation/absorption of phonons during the scattering. In this paper we apply the model to the case of the electron backscattering from Al(111), finding good agreement between calculated and measured angular distributions. In addition to this, we present a decomposition of the calculated intensity into the contributions of the scattering events with excitation and/or absorption of n phonons (0