Impact Collision Ion Scattering Spectroscopy Applied to the Determination of Atomic Surface Structure

The technique of impact collision ion scattering spectroscopy (ICISS) was used to investigate the atomic structure and low energy ion scattering dynamics from various surfaces. A new formalism for calculating the three-dimensional cross section for an ion to scatter sequentially and classically from two atoms has been developed. This method can be used to assist in the interpretation of ICISS data in terms of quantitative surface-structure models. Shadowing and blocking effects for energetic ions scattering from more than one atom are shown to be special cases of rainbow scattering. Even at keV energies and above, the cross section at the critical angle for scattering must be evaluated by quantum or semi-classical means to avoid the singularity in the classically calculated cross sections. In an ICISS investigation of the Ag(110) surface, a surface flux peak analysis demonstrated that the surface was not a complete monolayer, but rather contained 10-15% random vacancies. Subsurface Li^+ scattering results confirmed the oscillatory relaxation of the first two atomic layers of the surface, with Delta_{12} = -7.5% and Delta_{23} = 4.0%. Modeling of the neutralization mechanism for the He^+ scattering gave a best fit time-dependent Auger neutralization time constant of 0.84 +/- 0.08 fs. A neutralization study of 5 keV He^+ ions scattered from Au adatoms on the Si(111)- sqrt{3} x sqrt {3}-Au surface showed the He^+ ICISS data contained false shadowing features that were actually the result of local neutralization effects. Good agreement was obtained for a radially dependent ion-atom neutralization theory with rate R = Aexp (-ar) , where A and a are 15.5 fs^{ -1} and 1.94 A^{-1} , respectively. A detailed examination of the Si(111)- sqrt{3} x sqrt{3 })-Ag surface was also made. The 5 keV Li ^+ ICISS data gave evidence for Ag island formation at single monolayer coverages of silver, while the LEED, AES and LEIS data showed that at relatively high coverages of Ag (35 ML) small areas of sqrt {3} x sqrt{3} character were still present. Nine structurally different models of the sqrt{3} surface were tested and compared to the experimental ICISS results, with only the honeycomb-chained-trimer and missing-top-layer models found to be consistent with the Li^+ ICISS results.