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Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B 315 (2013) 206 212 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/nimb Effects of the atomic level shift in the Auger neutralization rates of noble metal surfaces R.C. Monreal a,, D. Goebl b, D. Primetzhofer b,1, P. Bauer b a Departamento de Física Teórica de la Materia Condensada and Condensed Matter Physics Centre (IFIMAC), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain b Institut für Experimentalphysik, Abteilung für Atom-und Oberflächenphysik, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, 4040 Linz, Austria article info abstract Article history: Received 15 October 2012 Received in revised form 4 March 2013 Available online 26 March 2013 Keywords: Charge exchange Auger neutralization LEIS Noble metals In this work we compare characteristics of Auger neutralization of He þ ions at noble metal and free-electron metal surfaces. For noble metals, we find that the position of the energy level of He with respect to the Fermi level has a non-negligible influence on the values of the calculated Auger rates through the evaluation of the surface dielectric susceptibility. We conclude that even though our calculated rates are accurate, further theoretical effort is needed to obtain realistic values of the energy level of He in front of these surfaces. Ó 2013 Elsevier B.V. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license. 1. Introduction Electron and energy transfer processes between an atom or molecule and a surface are extremely important for their many applications in physics and chemistry such as, e.g., surface analytical tools, particle detection, plasma wall interactions, or catalysis. Therefore, a substantial body of work is devoted to the understanding of the relevant microscopic mechanisms [1 5]. In this respect, it is desirable to design model systems where single processes can be studied under well-defined conditions. The two basic charge transfer mechanisms are known as resonant and Auger. Resonant processes are single electron mechanisms in which an electron tunnels from/to the atom to/from the solid when the energy level of the atom is in resonance with the continuum of states of the solid. Resonant processes, being one-electron ones have been described abundantly in the literature using different techniques [1,3 6]. Besides resonant tunneling, Auger processes are the second fundamental electron transfer processes for ion surface interactions. Auger neutralization (AN) and Auger ionization (AI) are two-electron processes. In AN, one electron from the surface is transferred to a bound state (often the ground state) of the atom while, by virtue of electron electron interaction, energy and momentum are transferred to the solid creating surface excitations (electron hole pairs and plasmons). In AI an electron bound to the atom is Corresponding author. Tel.: +34 914974903. E-mail address: r.c.monreal@uam.es (R.C. Monreal). 1 Current address: Institutionen för Fysik och Astronomi, Uppsala Universitet, Box 516, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden transferred to a state above the Fermi energy with the creation of surface excitations. Energy conservation requires kinetic energy from the atom and therefore AI is only possible above a threshold kinetic energy. Being two-electron processes, Auger processes are generally less efficient than resonant charge transfer and can be best studied in situations where the latter are energetically forbidden. In this work we will be concerned with systems in which slow noble gas ions are incident on high work function metal surfaces. For these systems the atomic ground state is non-degenerate with the occupied electronic states of the surface and the atomic excited states are resonant with the empty states of the metal. Fig. 1 illustrates schematically the relative positions of the different energy levels for the case of He þ. Moreover, since the ion velocity is typically much smaller that the Fermi velocity of the metal electrons, AI processes are not possible. Therefore, these are ideal systems to isolate and study Auger neutralization since it is the only possible mechanism of charge transfer. Since the pioneering work of Hagstrum [7], a fair number of experimental and theoretical studies have been devoted to the neutralization of He þ ions in front of metal surfaces. However, the difficulty of dealing with electron electron interactions in many-electron systems has been the main cause why Auger processes have not been described with a good accuracy until recently. Most of the calculations of the Auger neutralization rate of an ion in front of a metal surface have been performed within the jellium model, focusing on plasmon excitation [8 14] and/or effects of the surface barrier [15]. However, experiments of He þ interacting with Ag [16 18] and Al [19,20] surfaces at grazing incidence and also with Cu and Au surfaces at normal incidence [21,22] revealed a pronounced dependence of ion fractions on the crystallographic 0168-583X Ó 2013 Elsevier B.V. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nimb.2013.03.031

R.C. Monreal et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B 315 (2013) 206 212 207 neutrals and ions for different energies (different distances of neutralization) [19]. The latter was an experiment proposed by More et al. [26], that directly measured reduced (and even negative) energy shifts of the ground state energy of He close to the surface. A similar downward shift was also found for the ground state of Ar in front of a KCl (001) surface [33]. The problem of energy level variation of atoms in front of noble metal surfaces is addressed in section III. In Section 4 we present the results of our investigation on the influence of the atomic level position on the calculated Auger neutralization rates and the conclusions are expounded in Section 5. Atomic units (e ¼ h ¼ m e ¼ 1) are used throughout this article unless otherwise stated. 2. Theory of the corrugated Auger neutralization rate Fig. 1. Schematic energy diagram for interaction of He with a high work function metal surface. W: work function; blue shaded area: occupied states of conduction band; brown curves: energy levels of He as function of distance from the surface for states indicated. Green arrow: resonant neutralization (RN), blue arrows: Auger neutralization (AN). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.) face of the target surface. Differences in the ion fractions measured along different directions of the same face have also been found. The jellium model, being translationally invariant with respect to the surface, can only model the face dependence by placing the jellium edge at a distance of 1 d in front of the first atomic layer, 2 d being the interplanar distance [23], and it was applied in this way to explain the observed differences between ion fractions of Ag (110) and Ag (111) surfaces in [16,17]. It is, however, completely unable to distinguish between different atomic directions within the surface. Then, a theory of Auger neutralization beyond the jellium model becomes essential to be able to account for all these crystalline effects and for a better understanding of the microscopic Auger mechanism. With this aim, the theory was reformulated to include corrugation effects in the way we describe in Section 2. The question of how well any theory of AN is able to quantitatively reproduce the experiments is deeply connected to the problem of how the energy levels of atoms change in the proximity of a solid surface. This was at the origin of a historical controversy only solved recently. Measurements of the high-energy tails of the electron distributions [7] and measurements of energy gains of ions prior to neutralization [24] showed changes in the energy level of the incident ions of about 2 ev. From this value and making use of concepts of the classical image potential, He þ was assumed to be neutralized at distances of ca. 7 a.u. from the surface which required AN rates orders of magnitude larger than theoretically predicted [7,24]. However, Merino et al. [25], More et al. [26], and van Someren et al. [27] pointed out that the He- 1s level shift might be substantially reduced compared to the classical behavior for distances of some atomic units in front of the surface, as a consequence of the breaking of the classical image potential concept at close distances. Actually, theoretical calculations of the He-1s level energy shift showed reduced values or even negative shifts close to the surface as a result of chemical interactions with the surface [26,25,28]. Similar deviations from the classical behavior were also calculated for the 1s state of H [29] and for excited states of He in front of an Al surface [30], and are also predicted for other systems [31]. Finally, agreement between theory and experiment was established based on measurements of shifts of the high-energy tails of Auger electron distributions [32] and shifts of angular distributions for incident In this section we briefly resume the basic steps in the formulation of a theory for including corrugation in the calculation of the Auger neutralization rate. We refer the interested reader to Refs. [11,13,34] for more details. Following Fermi s golden-rule of first-order perturbation theory, it is possible to write down the formula for the probability per unit time that an electron of the solid, in the n-band with wave vector ~ k and energy ~k;n, described by the Bloch wave function u ~k;n ð~rþ, experiences a transition to the atomic state of the projectile u a ð~r ~ R a Þ (which we assume to be at rest at a position ~ R a ) while transferring energy x and momentum parallel to the surface q k as [11 13] 1 s ð ~ R a Þ¼2 X ~ k;n with, 0 Z dx d 2 ~q k ð2pþ 2 dz dz 0 Imvð~q k ; x; z; z 0 ÞV ~k;n ð~q k ; zþ V ~ k;n ð~q k ; z 0 Þ dðx þ E a ~k;n Þ; V ~k;n ð~q k ; zþ ¼ 2p q k < u ~k;n ð~r 2 Þje ı ~q k ~q 2e q k jz z 2 j ju a ð~r 2 ~ R a Þ >: ð2þ In Eqs. (1) and (2), V ~k;n ð~q k ; zþ represents an external potential acting on the metal as a consequence of the neutralization event and vð~q k ; x; z; z 0 Þ is the dielectric response of the surface which Fig. 2. Calculated dependence of the He-1s level with the distance to the Al surface (continuous black line) [28]. The conduction band of the Al surface is indicated with the dashed area. The red dotted line represents the position of the unperturbed He- 1s level. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.) ð1þ

208 R.C. Monreal et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B 315 (2013) 206 212 describes how the metal reacts to any perturbation of energy x and momentum parallel to the surface q k. E a is the energy of the atomic state of the projectile (with respect to its initial state) and the d-function appearing in Eq. (1) expresses energy conservation. Now we can express our Bloch wave function as a linear combination of atomic orbitals (LCAO), in a way standard to tightbinding methods in Solid State Physics, u ~k;n ð~rþ ¼p 1 ffiffiffiffi X C ðnþ a N ð~ kþ X e ı~ k ~ R u a ð~r ~ RÞ; ð3þ a ~ R where u a ð~r ~ RÞ are atomic orbitals centered at the lattice positions ~ R; N being the number of lattice points. Now substituting this equation into Eq. (2) and after some straightforward algebra, we arrive to our final formula for the Auger neutralization rate as 1 s ð R ~ a Þ¼2 X X a; ~ R a 0 ; ~ R 0 Z EF d 0 Z dx d 2 ~q k ð2pþ 2 dz Imvð~q k ; x; z; z 0 ÞV a; ~ R ð~q k ; zþ V a 0 ; ~ R 0 ð~q k ; z 0 Þ q a ~ R;a 0 ~ R 0ðÞ dðx þ E a Þ: In this equation, q a ~ R;a 0 R ~ 0ðÞ is the density of states (DOS) expressed in the basis fa; ~ Rg of atomic orbitals, where the energy integrates up to the Fermi level because only electrons in occupied states can neutralize the ion. The corresponding expressions for the matrix elements in that basis now read V a; ~ R ð~q k ; zþ 2p < u q a ð~r 2 R ~ a Þje ı ~q k ~q 2e q k jz z 2 j ju a ð~r 2 ~ RÞ >: ð5þ k dz 0 ð4þ Notice that, since x has to be positive, only electrons with energies above E a can be considered. The wave functions appearing in Eq. (5) should be orthonormal. To construct an orthonormal basis from an initial set of atomic orbitals centered at different sites, w m, we follow the Löwdin method in which the orthonormal basis is obtained as u l ¼ X m S 2 lm w m; with S lm w l jw m > being the overlap integral. In the calculations presented in this work, we start with a set w m of Hartree Fock Fig. 3. The Auger neutralization rates of He on Au (111) and Al (111) as a function of the distance to the surface. Black symbols: total rates; green symbols: contribution of the s electrons; blue squares: contribution of the 3p electrons to Al; red dots: contribution of the 5d electrons to Au. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.) ð6þ Fig. 4. The Auger neutralization rate of He on Au (111) (a) and Al (111) (b) as a function of the distance to the surface for different lateral positions of He on the lattice unit cell. atomic orbitals for He and the metal atoms expressed in the gaussian basis of Ref. [35]. For the He/Al case, we include the 1s orbital of He and all orbitals of Al. However, we have checked that the results do not change if we only include the valence 3s and 3p orbitals. Then we only use the 6s, 5d, 5p and 5s orbitals of Au when considering the system He/Au. In our calculations we include all atoms within a certain cut-off radius centered at the projectile position. This cut-off radius is chosen large enough to warrant that all important contributions to the AN-rate are considered. All of the densities of states are calculated ab initio using the FIREBALL code of Ref. [36]. An important ingredient in the calculation of the Auger rates is the dielectric susceptibility vð~q k ; x; z; z 0 Þ. A consistent treatment of this function in terms of Bloch wave functions is not possible at present, mainly because it requires inclusion of a large number of reciprocal lattice vectors in the surface plane. Moreover, we need to evaluate v numerically for many values of x and q k (typically 0 < x < 1a:u: and 0 < q k < 2a:u:) and therefore our calculation has to be simplified by using the jellium model. Al will be described as a free-electron gas of r s ¼ 2:07 a:u: and, for the noble metals, we introduce suitable modifications to take into account that either s or d electrons can be excited in the Auger process. From optical data, we know the number of electrons that contribute to the optical properties of noble metals at each frequency x. We can thus define an effective electronic density n eff ðxþ and 3 an effective r s value, r s ðxþ ¼ð4pn eff ðxþ Þ1=3. Then vð~q k ; x; z; z 0 Þis

R.C. Monreal et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B 315 (2013) 206 212 209 Fig. 6. The Auger neutralization rate of He on Al (111) (on-top position) as a function of the atom surface distance. Calculations have been performed for the values of the position of the He-1s level with respect to the Fermi level indicated in the figure. Fig. 5. The Auger neutralization rate of He on Au (111) (a) and Ag (111) (b) (on-top position) as a function of the atom surface distance. Calculations have been performed for the values of the position of the He-1s level with respect to the Fermi level indicated in each subfigure. calculated within the self-consistent-field approximation for a jellium surface described by that r s ðxþ. The jellium edge is canonically placed at 1 d above the first atomic layer in all the cases. 2 Therefore, in our procedure corrugation enters in the AN rate through the basis set of atomic orbitals centered at different lattice points but we do not include corrugation effects in the surface susceptibility, apart from the position of the jellium edge. This is not fully correct for noble metal surfaces. It is known that the relation of dispersion of the surface plasmons in Ag do indeed depend on crystal face and on the crystallographic direction of q k [37]. Simplified models have been proposed to describe this effect in which the d bands are modeled by a background of d-charge [38] or a fixed lattice of point dipoles [39,40], while the s p electrons are treated in the jellium model. However, these models require the use of adjustable parameters. 3. Energy level variation As already stressed in the introduction, consideration of energy level variation (level shift) of ions approaching solid surfaces has been a key point for advancing in the understanding of Auger neutralization of ions at solid surfaces. Fig. 2 shows this behavior for the system He/Al. At infinite distance, the energy level is at E a ¼ 20:2 ev with respect to the Fermi level of Al (E a ¼ 24:6 ev with respect to the vacuum level). When approaching the surface, the level first shifts up in energy following the classical image potential until ca. 7 a.u. At closer distances it feels the interaction with the 3sp electrons of Al which pushes the level down in energy. At very close distances, typically smaller than 2 a.u., the interaction with the core 2sp levels of Al sets in. This interaction is strongly repulsive and promotes the level very quickly. Experiments in grazing scattering conditions, in which the perpendicular energy of He is small (on the order of tens of ev), are sensitive to a region of distances of 2 4 a.u. where the He-1s level shifts down with decreasing distance. This was clearly demonstrated in Ref. [41] in which measured energy gains were in the range between +2 ev and ev (zero energy gain or zero level shift corresponds to the a value of 24.6 ev for the He-1s level with respect to vacuum). Another output of the same work was that the magnitude of the energy gain depends on the crystal face and, at a given incident energy, differences of ca. 1 ev were found between the (111) and (110) faces of Al. This is due to the fact that, since AN rates and, consequently, typical distances for neutralization depend on crystal face, the position of the energy level at these distances is a function of crystal face as well. Moreover, both experimentally determined energy gains and ion fractions of He þ scattered from Al (111), (110) and (100) surfaces showed very good agreement with molecular dynamics simulations in which theoretically calculated Auger rates and He level shifts entered as input, without using any kind of adjustable parameter. In this work we are concerned with the LEIS regime in which He þ with an energy of a few kev is normally incident on the metal surface and surviving ions scattered at a large angle are collected. The turning points of the trajectories are smaller than typically 1 a.u. of a surface atom, and more than 10% of the incident ions survive neutralization (ion fractions of 10 3 10 4 were found in grazing scattering). This suggest that experiments in the LEIS regime are sensitive to the region very close to the surface, where the position of the He level is influenced by the interaction with the core electrons of the target atoms. Unfortunately, theoretical calculations of the He level shift in front of noble metal surfaces are not available at present. Therefore, in the calculations to be presented next, it will be taken as a constant adjustable parameter. Its value can be considered as the mean energy of the level in the range of distances where the Auger interaction takes place. We will see that its value has a non-negligible influence on the values of the AN rates, the origin of which will be investigated in the next section.

210 R.C. Monreal et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B 315 (2013) 206 212 Fig. 7. Ion fractions of He scattered from polycrystalline Ag (a) and polycrystalline Au (b). Experimental points are shown by open symbols. Calculations (closed symbols) have been performed with the values of the position of the He-1s level with respect to the Fermi level indicated in the insets. 4. Results and discussion Calculations of the Auger transition rates for He þ interacting with Ag (111) and (110) surfaces were presented in Refs. [42 44]. Here we will first compare the AN rates for He on Al (111) and Au (111) to appreciate the differences found between a noble metal and the prototype of a free-electron-metal. This is done in Fig. 3 which shows the rates as a function of the distance to the surface, for He on top of a metal atom. The main contribution to the rate of Al, which dominates at all distances, is made by the 3p z orbitals of the on-top atom and its neighbors. The z direction is pointing towards the He atom. In contrast, the AN rate of Au is dominated by different orbitals depending on the distance between He and Au. At large distances, AN due to s electrons of many atoms of Au is the main contribution to the AN rate, while the prominent maximum found at 1 a.u. is due to the contribution of the d-electrons of the Au atom on top of He. Notice that the rate of Au can be 3 larger than that of Al at distances of ca. 1 a.u. but the opposite happens at 4 a.u. Another difference between Al and the other noble metals is that the latter show much more corrugation than Al with respect to Auger neutralization. Fig. 4(a) and (b) shows the AN rates of Au (111) and Al (111), respectively, assuming the He atom to be at the following lateral positions within the (111) unit cell: on-top, the two non-equivalent center positions and in the mid point between two neighbor atoms (Pos 1). We can appreciate that the rate of Al shows a weak dependence on lateral position compared to Au. The reason is, again, that the electrons contributing to the rate of Al are the extended 3sp electrons while the localized d electrons are the important ones in the Au case and for the other noble metals as well. It is also interesting to note that in the case of Au, the on-top rate is the smallest one close enough to the surface due to the strong decrease in overlap between the 1s electron of He and the 5d electrons of Au. In Figs. 3 and 4 the He level has been shifted up in energies by 2 ev, which is the typical value for small incident energies. We stress here that these rates yielded excellent agreement between calculated ion fractions and experiments for He on Ag (111) and (110) at grazing incidence in [42,43] and the azimuthal dependence of the ion fractions was very well reproduced. We also found a good agreement in the He/Al system investigated in Ref. [41]. This means that our calculated rates are accurate enough since they differ by a large factor in Ag and Al. He þ scattering from noble metal surfaces in the LEIS regime was investigated in [45]. It was found that the values of the level shift of He have a profound influence on the calculated AN rates that fit the experiment and in this work we examine the causes for this phenomenon. Fig. 5(a) and (b) shows the AN rates of He þ on Au and Ag respectively, for several values of the position of the He-1s level

R.C. Monreal et al. / Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B 315 (2013) 206 212 211 with respect to the Fermi level. Here the rates are presented in a linear scale to better appreciate the changes. The values of the level position near 8 ev correspond to the standard upward level shift of 2 ev. We notice that, for Au and Ag (and also for Cu, not shown here) the rates increase notably as the He-level goes down in energies. The reason is the following: The value of E a, measured with respect to the Fermi level, determines the range of energies transferred to the metal, x min ¼ bottom E a ; x max ¼ E a, where bottom is the energy at the bottom of the conduction band. This range moves toward higher energies when the level goes down. In our approximation for the screened susceptibility vðxþ we increase the density of the electron gas, n eff ðxþ, with increasing excitation energy, which also causes an increase in the plasma frequency. We know that, when the plasmons of the metal can be excited, they make a very important contribution to the rate [8,11,12]. Therefore our approximation makes the metal to screen very efficiently at high frequencies. Thus, the rates can change by 30% when the level changes by 2 ev. This is not the case for free-electron metals of similar band width. Fig. 6 shows the behavior with level shift of the AN rate of He/Al. When we move the level down in energies, the rate first increases slightly and then decreases because the screening ceases to be effective at high frequencies, much larger than the plasma frequency. Fig. 7(a) and (b) shows the comparison of experimental and calculated ion fractions of He þ scattered from polycrystalline Ag and polycrystalline Au, respectively, for different values of the energy level position of He with respect to the Fermi level. The polycrystalline samples, were approximated as a surface with randomly oriented (111) domains [46]. Consequently the ion fraction was obtained as an average over trajectories scattered from a (111) surface with normal incidence and arbitrary azimuth exit directions. Notice that the order of magnitude of the ion fractions is well reproduced by the theory and almost perfect agreement with experiment can be obtained by fitting the values of the level position. In the light of our discussion above, given our approximate treatment of the dielectric susceptibility of noble metal surfaces, we cannot asses how accurate these values are. We deem them to be not too unrealistic for a number of reasons. First because these values are independent of azimuth [44]. We know that the experimental ion yields for scattering along symmetry directions have contributions from the first and the second atomic layers. If band structure effects were very important in the calculation of vðxþ, they would produce significant differences in the rates for the first and second atomic layers. Then these differences had to be somehow compensated by differences in the level shifts. We do not see these differences in the level shift since our approximations yield very good agreement with experiments for both Ag and Cu surfaces. Second because the value of the level shift that fits the experimental results for He/Au is.5 ev, which is not far from what has been measured for the He/Al system. However, in the case of Ag we need to invoke a level shift of 4 ev. This large and positive value of the shift could be an indication that these ions probe that region of distances to a surface atom where the He level is being quickly promoted since the experimental incident energies are near the threshold for collision induced neutralization and reionization processes in the system He/Ag. This would also explain why the same value of the level position is good for describing ion scattering from the first and the second atomic layers. Therefore, it seems that realistic calculations of the behavior of the energy level of He in front of noble metal surfaces are needed. 5. Conclusions In this work we have first compared the Auger neutralization rates for He þ on noble and free-electron-like metal surfaces, choosing Au (111) and Al (111) as typical cases. We show that there can be a factor of 3 to 4 difference between AN-rates, depending on the distance between ion and the surface. In spite of this large difference, the calculated values have proven to be accurate enough giving very good agreement with experiments under grazing scattering conditions and in the LEIS regime. We have shown that the position of the He-1s level with respect to the Fermi level have a non-negligible influence on the values of the Auger rates of the noble metals, through the values of the surface dielectric susceptibility. However, our calculation of vðxþ is only approximate and its accuracy cannot be ascertained at present. 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