Quantification of surface effects. Monte Carlo simulation of REELS spectra to obtain surface excitation parameter

Complete text of publication follows. The surface excitation effect is investigated by using the quantum mechanical frame work of complex self-energy of electrons which interact with a bounded semi-infinite medium. In the self-energy formalism, differential inverse inelastic mean free path (DIIMFP) has contributions from bulk and surface plasmons. Monte Carlo simulation of the interaction of electrons with a solid medium and surface has been performed. The surface excitation parameter (SEP) is then obtained from the simulated reflection electron energy loss spectroscopy (REELS) spectra. The calculated SEP results by Monte Carlo simulation are compared with the previous calculations of total surface excitation probability, which was estimated by a numerical integration of surface term of DIIMFP. The contribution merely due to surface excitations towards REELS spectra is extracted by subtracting the two Monte Carlo simulated REELS spectra that based on the two models of electron inelastic scattering, i.e. a full surface model (SM) and a pure bulk model (BM). The surface excitations found to be significant at low energy losses and diminish at higher energy losses whereas the bulk plasmon contributions show opposite behavior and are negligible at lower energy losses. The average number of surface excitations is then evaluated by the computation of ratio of the integrated surface contribution to the elastic peak. The calculated results for Ag are found to be reasonably in agreement with our previous results for total probability of surface excitations and other reported experimental data for SEP. Surface correction factor (SCF) is calculated using SEP for several metals and is compared with the reported ratio of SCF with Ni sample as reference (see Fig. 1). Acknowledgements This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 10874160), 111 Project, Chinese Education Ministry and Chinese Academy of Sciences, the grant Bolyai from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and TeT Grant No. CHN-28/2003. K. Salma also acknowledges PAEC, Islamabad for the facility to collect some of her work during doctorate studies at USTC, PR China, in the form of present article.