A study of the (001) face of NiO by means of atomic diffraction

NiO is, among the metal oxides, one of the best characterized compounds; its easily cleaved (001) face is ideally suited to test, for a new class of materials, the technique and the way of analysis successfully used for atomic beam diffraction from alkali-halide surfaces. Aside from this general interest, NiO has important magnetic properties; at room temperature and below it is antiferromagnetic in the bulk, and then diffraction of a suitable atomic beam can reveal whether the antiferromagnetic structure extends up to the surface layer. To characterize the (001) face of a NiO crystal cleaved in air and taken at 78 K in a cyrogenic UHV environment, scattering measurements with He and H2 supersonic beams were performed in many geometrical conditions. (Auth.)